Lightning AI Expands Executive Team with Key Finance, Marketing, and People Leader Appointments
NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lightning AI, the vertically integrated AI cloud company, today announced three additions to its executive team: Heather Paduck as Chief Financial Officer, Betty Junod as Chief Marketing Officer, and Jarlath Doherty as Chief People Officer.
“Following the merger with Voltage Park, Lightning now offers customers a full-stack AI cloud from infrastructure to developer platform services, that accelerate our customers’ time to value,” said Sam Yagan, Executive Chairman of the Board. “We’re thrilled to welcome Heather, Betty, and Jarlath to bring their strategic leadership and operational strength in building for our next phase of growth.”
Heather Paduck joins as Chief Financial Officer to lead global financial strategy including, planning, accounting, treasury and capital strategy to scale GPU and data center capacity to meet customer demand. Paduck brings more than 25 years of financial leadership in data center and real estate in hyperscale and enterprise markets. She previously served as CFO of STACK Infrastructure; Northwood Investors, a global real estate private equity firm; and Pembroke Real Estate, a Fidelity Investments subsidiary.
Betty Junod joins as Chief Marketing Officer to lead the global marketing and communications organization, establish category leadership, drive enterprise and developer mindshare, and accelerate enterprise go-to-market and product-led growth. Junod brings decades of experience in category defining enterprise and open source infrastructure and developer platform companies. She previously served as CMO and SVP of Heroku at Salesforce, and held marketing leadership roles at VMware Tanzu, Docker, and solo.io.
Jarlath Doherty joins as Chief People Officer to lead the people organization across talent acquisition, development, total rewards and workplace. Doherty has spent more than 20 years building and scaling people functions inside high-growth technology companies. He previously held positions as CPO of Squarespace and Collibra, scaling the data intelligence company's global team through a period of rapid expansion, and held global talent leadership roles at LinkedIn, Yahoo and Deloitte.
The appointments follow Lightning AI's January 2026 merger with Voltage Park, bringing together the model training platform with more than 40,000 NVIDIA GPUs across nine U.S. data centers. Lightning AI serves an array of enterprise teams alongside AI-native companies including Cursor, Reflection AI, and Black Forest Labs.
About Lightning AI
Lightning AI is the vertically integrated AI cloud company behind PyTorch Lightning. The company's unified hardware and software stack lets organizations build, evaluate, and operationalize AI workflows across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and air-gapped deployments. Following its January 2026 merger with Voltage Park, Lightning AI operates more than 40,000 NVIDIA GPUs across nine U.S. data centers, serving AI-native companies and enterprise teams. Learn more at lightning.ai.
Media Contact
Lilly Savin | lightningai@thisisoutcast.com
© Copyright Globe Newswire, Inc. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Globe Newswire, Inc.
