NextSilicon Appoints Industry Veterans Kit Chee as Chief Sales Officer and Kristin Owens as Chief Marketing Officer, Strengthening Global Commercial Capabilities

TEL AVIV, Israel & PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NextSilicon, a leader in next-generation computing solutions for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), today announced the appointments of Kit Chee as Chief Sales Officer and Kristin Owens as Chief Marketing Officer. They join as NextSilicon scales Maverick-2, its rack-ready accelerator platform, from early deployments to broader customer rollouts.

Chee will oversee NextSilicon’s global sales organization, drive revenue growth, and build strategic customer relationships across AI, HPC, and enterprise markets. Owens will lead global marketing, including brand, demand generation, and communications. Both report to Rupal Hollenbeck, who joined in August to lead global commercial strategy.

Chee brings 33 years of experience spanning semiconductors, data center, cloud and HPC sales. He spent most of his career at Intel, most recently leading Cloud, Enterprise and HPC sales. He then served as Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Business Development and Operations Officer at Ampere before joining Check Point Software Technologies as Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances and Field Enablement.

“NextSilicon is solving a problem I’ve heard from customers throughout my career: they want better performance with maximum efficiency and without complicated software rewrites,” said Chee. “The technology is gaining traction at leading labs and the team is exceptional. I’m thrilled to join Elad and Rupal and help bring it to many more customers.”

Owens brings 26 years of experience across marketing, business development, and operations at public companies and high-growth startups, including Intel, Cerebras Systems, Supermicro, KPMG, and Avnet. Most recently, she was Vice President of Field and Partner Marketing at Check Point, where she also served as interim CMO.

“NextSilicon has technology that is already proving itself in some of the most demanding computing environments in the world,” said Owens. “I’m excited to build a marketing organization that tells this story, and connects that technology to the customers and partners who need it. I’m looking forward to working alongside Kit and Rupal to turn awareness into pipeline.”

“I’m thrilled to welcome these two senior leaders to NextSilicon at this important time in our history. Kit has spent three decades building and leading global data center sales organizations, and he knows how to build a repeatable commercial engine,” said Rupal Hollenbeck, President and Chief Business Officer of NextSilicon. “Kristin brings decades of marketing depth and experience, and will partner with Kit to create awareness and convert that to interest and deployments.”

With Chee and Owens on board, NextSilicon fortifies its senior go-to-market leadership team alongside Hollenbeck. As the company scales, it is hiring across sales, field engineering, and customer success. Explore open roles and become a Maverick at www.nextsilicon.com/careers.

About NextSilicon

NextSilicon builds software-defined hardware that adapts to the work, not the other way around. Its adaptable architecture reconfigures to each workload at runtime, so existing code runs faster and more efficiently with no rewrites, and keeps pace as models and algorithms change. Proven for more than eight years in high-performance computing and at Sandia National Laboratories, where it passed a production acceptance on unmodified code, NextSilicon is now bringing the same architecture to AI inference, for future-proof computing as power becomes the limit on scale.