Building the revenue engine for Runware's next stage of growth
After taking Confluent's EMEA business from scale-up to IPO scale, Carlos joins Runware to do it again at 10x speed and volume. Here's what he's here to build next.
The revenue leader who survived and thrived in some of the most challenging growth environments in tech is joining us to bring a new level of execution to our GTM function.
When we started hiring for this role, we all knew we were unicorn hunting. We needed a seasoned leader who drove hundreds of millions in direct sales, and who still wants to be in the field selling to T1 orgs and closing deals. Who can run a five-person team or a five-hundred-person team with the precision and intensity of a special ops unit. Who gets that platform verticalization and infrastructure differentiation is key to AI. Who has a strong bench of talent to pull from. Who will work the crazy hours that AI demands. And who is willing to join a startup to build real equity value instead of taking the safe seat at an established player.
And, and, and… the bar was through the roof. But the bar has been met.
25 years. Three continents. One kind of problem.
Carlos has spent his career in technical infrastructure sales, selling to every type of customer, from the largest T1 organizations to rapidly moving scale-ups. When I was doing reference calls, I heard "this guy did 2–3 client calls a day, every day, for the five years I worked with him. While running a massive team." Building relationships and structure is where Carlos thrives. He sells into markets where buyers have high expectations. The product has to earn trust before it earns a contract, but it also has to be ready for deployment yesterday. He's done it across the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
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, and led the engineered systems business in Hong Kong after Oracle acquired Sun. In a growth environment with sky-high standards and some of the highest industry churn levels in the business, he didn't just survive. He was a top seller year over year.
Building Confluent EMEA from the ground up
At Confluent, Carlos joined to build the EMEA Commercial business from scratch. 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. Again, from scratch, selling new technical products with long sales cycles. Both territories overachieved their targets and helped drive the IPO story.
"What drew me here was the combination of real infrastructure differentiation, a developer base already at scale, and a market that's about to consolidate hard. That's not a turnaround. That's an acceleration play."
— Carlos Roman, Head of Revenue
The market, the product, and the opportunity
When deciding where to build again, Carlos chose us for three reasons.
In the crowded AI market, Runware has built a real moat
We don't just package together solutions offered by others: models, GPUs, UIs. We are building the foundational infrastructure on which any AI model can run at 10x efficiency. While others burn capital trying to outrun the absence of a real differentiator, our team builds deeply differentiated tech that delivers exponential unit economics gains.
The market is bigger than massive
AI already is, and will continue to expand into, almost every product and user experience. It's already a $100B+ market and we are just scratching the surface. The opportunity to build a trillion-dollar company is still up for grabs.
The right GTM engine amplifies everything
When you've got the market and the moat on your side and you're able to build a world-class GTM engine from the ground up, you are throwing jet fuel onto the fire. Carlos knew he could drive outsized impact by bringing his expertise to our leadership bench.
From strong demand to a sales machine
Over the last 12 months, we have 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 scale it 100x, by meeting with every large enterprise adding AI and every AI-native team with a global success story. With founder and technical backing, he'll work with our clients and partners to ensure every deal we do together is uncompromising: the best model access, the best price, the best performance, the best customer experience.
"Every serious AI team is under pressure to ship faster and cut inference costs. Runware solves both. My job is to make sure every organization that needs this knows we exist and what we can do. That's the conversation I'm here to have at scale."
— Carlos Roman, Head of Revenue
A large priority 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. A-players who in one call understand the need, the scale, the best pricing, and the easiest path to technical adoption. A team that can one-shot a sales process the way a top performing coding tool one-shots a working solution.
Why right now is the right moment
Carlos has a specific view on where AI infrastructure is heading.
"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 exactly how to do that. That's the opportunity we're here 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.