HERMEUS WELCOMES KEN VENNER AS CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
The former SpaceX, Sierra Space, & Broadcom Chief Information Officer brings decades of deep tech leadership to the rapidly growing Hermeus team.
October 24, 2024
ATLANTA, GA – Hermeus, a leading aerospace and defense technology company specializing in high-speed aircraft, is thrilled to announce that Ken Venner has joined the company as Chief Operating Officer. In his role, Venner will be responsible for leading the IT, Security, Facilities, Supply Chain, and Safety organizations within Hermeus. Venner’s deep experience in leading technical teams through massive scaling will be critical as Hermeus rapidly expands its capabilities.
“Ken’s experience leading operations teams through hyperscaling at massively successful organizations is exactly what we were looking for in this role,” said AJ Piplica, Hermeus Co-Founder and CEO. “As I’ve gotten to know Ken over the past few months, I’ve found us to be deeply aligned on our engineering and development philosophy, along with our approach to management and leadership. His expertise will be critical as we prepare ourselves for similar growth in the coming years as our first products come to market.”
With Venner joining as COO, Hermeus co-founder Skyler Shuford has stepped into the role of President of the organization. Shuford commented on Venner’s arrival: “As an executive leader of non-traditional and disruptive aerospace, Ken has demonstrated his ability to consistently influence change and rewrite the playbook when necessary. His broad, cross-functional expertise and impressive technical depth make him a leader that the team can rally behind.“
Prior to joining Hermeus, Venner spent nearly seven years at SpaceX as Chief Information Officer leading the team that provided cost effective, high-performing, and “always on” tools and business processes for the company. Before SpaceX, Venner spent more than a decade at Broadcom, serving as Executive Vice President, Corporate Services and CIO. At Broadcom, Venner was responsible for building and managing massive grid computing infrastructure and delivering business applications that enabled the company to scale.
Most recently, Venner worked at Sierra Space as Senior Vice President and CIO.
“While hypersonic flight is undeniably exciting, what truly drew me to Hermeus is the team’s business roadmap and approach,” said Venner. “In order to succeed on our mission, we’re building a dynamic team of highly accountable individuals, empowering them with the tools and infrastructure they need to thrive. By fostering this environment of autonomy and accountability, we’re ensuring that our people – and the company – are set up to make history.”
ABOUT HERMEUS
Hermeus is an aerospace and defense technology company founded to radically accelerate air travel by delivering hypersonic aircraft. The company aims to develop hypersonic aircraft quickly and cost-effectively by integrating hardware-rich, iterative development with modern computing and autonomy. This approach has been validated through design, build, and test of the company’s first combined turbojet-ramjet engine and is now being scaled through its first flight vehicle program, Quarterhorse. Hermeus is also developing Darkhorse — an uncrewed hypersonic aircraft designed to deliver unique asymmetric capabilities to the warfighter.