Building the revenue engine for Runware's next stage of growth
The person who built Confluent's EMEA business from zero to $50M has joined Runware. Here's what he's here to build next.
The leader who has helped build and lead high-performing revenue teams at Oracle, Confluent, and Firebolt, has joined Runware. Carlos Roman is our new Head of Revenue, and his mandate is straightforward: build the commercial engine that takes Runware to its next stage of growth.
25 years. Three continents. One kind of problem.
Carlos has spent his career in technical infrastructure sales. Not because it's easy, but because it's where he's best. He sells into markets where buyers are sophisticated, the product has to earn trust before it earns a contract, and relationships take years to build. He's done it across the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
His strength is taking something from nothing and making it work. Building teams and closing deals that didn't exist before he walked in. That thread runs through everything he's done.
Two decades at Oracle
Carlos spent two decades at Oracle running enterprise businesses across multiple regions. He launched product lines across middleware, BI, CRM, and ERP, as well as led the engineered systems business in Hong Kong when Oracle acquired Sun. He has worked with large enterprises around the world.
Building Confluent EMEA from the ground up
At Confluent, Carlos initially joined to build the EMEA Commercial business, which did not exist when he arrived in Barcelona. After multiple years of triple and double-digit cloud consumption growth, he was asked to also lead the Digital Native and Emerging Markets business for EMEA. Building from scratch, selling new technical products that take time to sell. That's the environment he works best in.
The common thread across all of it has been building where nothing existed before. I've always been most energized by the blank page.
- Carlos Roman, Head of Revenue
The market, the product and the opportunity
When Carlos talks about why he joined Runware, he doesn't reach for generic enthusiasm. He points to three things.
The first is the market
AI inference is already a $100B+ market and growing fast. The problem Runware solves (fragmented model access, inefficient spend across providers) is a real pain point for every AI-native company building at scale. It's getting more acute, not less.
The second is the company
Runware's ambition is to become the default infrastructure for generative AI: the layer every AI-native company runs on. That means building something the rest of the market can't easily replicate. Our own hardware, our own inference engine, our own orchestration, all designed from the ground up for the economics and latency this category actually requires. That's not a positioning exercise. It's a bet that owning the full stack is the only way to serve serious AI workloads at the scale the market is heading toward.
The third is opportunity
The companies that build real enterprise Go-to-Market Engines now, while the market is still forming, will be significantly harder to displace when it matures.
Our end-to-end infrastructure built from the ground up delivers the best customer experience with price performance that is magnitudes better than any alternative in the market. Hundreds of thousands of developers are already building on it - and we are just getting started.
- Carlos Roman, Head of Revenue
From strong demand to a sales machine
Over the last 12 months, Runware has grown to 200K+ developers on the platform, raised $63M, and reached 300M end users. Carlos isn't here to fix something that's broken. He's here to build on what's working and scale it to the next level.
The first job is turning developer adoption into enterprise revenue. Runware already has thousands of developers using the API and growing on the platform. Carlos's job is identifying which of those accounts have the scale and direction to become long-term enterprise customers, and building a repeatable process around converting them.
The second is building toward more predictable revenue. Carlos has done this before. The goal is a business that isn't dependent on single accounts and isn't caught off guard by fluctuations in usage. That takes the right customer relationships and a team that knows how to build them.
Building committed revenue showing differentiated value is one of the things I'll be most focused on. You have to earn that conversation. It doesn't work if you push for it before the customer sees the value.
- Carlos Roman, Head of Revenue
The third is building the team. Not just hitting targets, but creating a function with the process and the talent to run without depending on any one person.
Twelve months from now, the shape of the business should look different. A committed revenue base and a customer portfolio that isn't riding on any single account. A team that runs the process without needing to escalate everything. That's what a real revenue engine looks like. And it's how you build a business that scales.
Why right now is the right moment
Carlos has a specific view on where AI infrastructure is heading. The current phase, where buyers chase the newest model regardless of cost, won't last. He frames it as the early iPhone years: each release felt like a generational leap, and people paid premiums just to have access. That normalizes.
When it does, the companies with real valuable relationships already in place will be significantly harder to compete with than the ones still trying to build them. An installed base of customers who trust you and have built on top of you isn't something a competitor can replicate with a better benchmark.
I expect consolidation. There are too many inference providers right now and not all of them have the hardware depth or margin structure to survive at scale. The ones that do will end up capturing the lion's share of a massive market.
- Carlos Roman, Head of Revenue
That's why this hire matters now and not later. The window for building those relationships is open. Carlos has spent 25 years learning how to do exactly that. That's the opportunity for us to take.
If you're evaluating Runware for production use or want to discuss an enterprise deployment, reach out to our team. We're also massively hiring. Find your perfect role.