Senior Leadership

Michael (Mike) Grimwood

Vice President Systems Engineering

Mike Grimwood is responsible for the systems design and development of Cohere’s software system. Mr. Grimwood has more than 20 years of experience in senior management of communications technologies and products. Mr. Grimwood joined Cohere in 2013 after serving as an Associate Technical Director in Broadcom’s Infrastructure and Networking Group. Mr. Grimwood’s previous experience also includes senior systems engineering and management roles at AMD, Terayon, and Applied Signal Technology. Mr. Grimwood received his BS degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

Prem Sankar Gopannan

Vice President of Product Architecture and Software Engineering

Prem Sankar Gopannan brings two decades of experience to Cohere. Mr. Gopannan is an Intel Innovator and active evangelist of Microservices and Private 5G/Telco/Edge Cloud architectures. Prior to joining the company in October 2020, Mr. Gopannan was the Head of Product Engineering at Lumina where he lead 5G product strategy and product development. Before Lumina, Mr. Gopannan led Ericsson’s Opensource-based SDN product strategy and development which was focused on a Cloud Native architecture for Telcos. Prior to Ericsson, Mr. Gopannan worked with leading companies such as Cisco and Novell in the areas of Network and Service Orchestration and Management. Mr. Gopannan received his M.Tech degree in Computer Engineering from Pondicherry University, India

Mark Russell

Director of Field Systems Engineering

Mark brings 35 years of experience to Cohere focused primarily on Service provider wireline and wireless networks. Early in Mark’s career his focus was on satellite communications in the DOD Intel space. Mark then moved to commercial wireline data networks most notably at VZ/Bell Atlantic and Juniper networks where he was involved in the very early building of the Internet as we know it today. He was part of the team that helped launch the iphone in ATT’s mobile network and the connectivity of the mobile and Internet data networks (3G/4G). Late in his 14 years at Juniper and the following 10 years he has focused on his passion for wireless networks with both LTE and service provider WiFi. Most recently he has been involved with private wireless CBRS 4G LTE and 5G networks.

Yoav Hebron

Vice President of Standards

Yoav Hebron has more than 30 years of experience in different roles related to wireline and wireless communications including leading set-top boxes, SoC designs as well as standards bodies such IEEE and 3GPP. In addition to his contribution to numerous standard bodies, Mr. Hebron was also an editor of DOCSIS and MoCA specifications, and a Chair/Vice Chair of multiple MoCA work groups.

Prior to re-joining Cohere Technologies in September 2021 as vice president of standards, Mr. Hebron was with Viasat where he led beam management activities and emerging technologies. Mr. Hebron was previously Cohere’s senior director of standards and vice president of research and development (2015 to 2018). Mr. Hebron’s previous experience includes systems engineering management roles with Comstream, Rockwell, Conexant, and Entropic. At Conexant Mr. Hebron led the development of DOCSIS and cable front end, SoCs, and the DOCSIS standard activities. At Entropic Mr. Hebron led all MoCA standard activities and was the project engineer of a third generation MoCA SoC. Mr. Hebron received his BS and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Art King

Director of Product Management and Marketing

Art King brings 3 decades of wireless, enterprise and IT experiences to Cohere Technologies. Prior to joining Cohere in September 2021, Mr. King led the development of enterprise services definitions and business case propositions at Corning Optical Communications. Prior to Corning, Mr. King spent 5 years with SpiderCloud Wireless, a company acquired by Corning in 2017. Before SpiderCloud, Mr. King was a leader in Nike’s IT infrastructure architecture and operations where he held various global roles over 10 years. Prior to Nike, Mr. King led the buildout of two multinational engineering and consulting organizations for an IP services network vendor and managed regional infrastructure operations at PacifiCorp. Mr. King holds a CISSP certification and a BS degree in Computer Engineering from Portland State University.

Shachar Kons

Director of R&D Engineering

Shachar Kons has over 20 years of experience in research & development of the physical layer for wireline and wireless communication systems and an expert on the OTFS waveform. Prior to joining Cohere Technologies in 2015, Mr. Kons was with Entropic Communications, as senior principal engineer, responsible for the development of the physical layer of the MoCA standard. Mr. Kons also held engineering positions with Trident Microsystems, NXP semiconductors, Conexant Systems, Rockwell semiconductors and Comstream. Mr. Kons was also a contributing member of the DVB standardization committee. Mr. Kons received his BS and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.