Former Spotify Director Joins Walnut to Lead R&D

Walnut, the interactive product demo leader, announced that it had appointed Eyal Erez as VP of R&D. 

The startup enables sales teams to quickly create and customize interactive product demos for software—without any coding. Walnut raised $56 million in its first year and grew to around 120 employees in its second.

Throughout his career, Eyal managed R&D teams at Google, Facebook, and Spotify. In his position at Spotify, he managed a group that built many of Spotify's core product features (including using artificial intelligence for music recommendations, search, and song discovery). His team consisted of some hundred developers.

"We grew very rapidly in our first two years and are already working with hundreds of companies—some of which are on the Fortune 500 list," said Yoav Vilner, CEO of Walnut. "For this reason, we relatively quickly came to the conclusion that we needed a very strong addition to manage our technological side. This is crucial as we approach building the next generation of the platform and start working with thousands more customers in the years to come."

“Eyal managed teams in companies whose products are used by hundreds of millions, and the professional knowledge he brings with him both in the worlds of development and in the worlds of artificial intelligence are in line with our vision as a company,” added Vilner.

Walnut’s platform makes it quick and easy to create interactive demos and operates in a secure environment in the cloud that prevents technical problems and crashes during live sales presentations. It provides data and analysis regarding the demos that can assist teams with optimizing their sales process and integrates with CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot.

The company already works with hundreds of software companies, including Adobe, Dell, NetApp, People AI, Medallia, Treasure Data. It also won a number of awards, including LinkedIn’s #1 startup in Israel, and was named as one of the one hundred companies worth working for, and the most promising startups.