Company: Adello, Redwood City, CA, USA
Company Description: Adello is reshaping the advertising industry as we know it today. Adello’s media-buying platform harnesses the power of Big Data technology to deliver mobile advertising to the right customer at the right time and location. More than 500 advertising partners trust Adello’s self-learning campaigns across 3 continents.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Female Executive of the Year – Business Products –11 to 2,500 Employees

Nomination Title: Jana Uhlig, COO

Describe for the judges the activities and accomplishments of the nominated executive since the beginning of July last year (up to 525 words):

Jana is passionate about building companies based on technology and data. As COO and Board Member of Adello, Jana secured $2M in funding from Swisscom and others, grew the organization from a European-only player to a global company with offices in 5 countries across 3 continents, and transformed Adello to become a technology-first player. All in the last 12 months. Under Jana’s leadership, Adello’s revenues grew six fold in 2 years while the team only increased by 50 percent over the same period. This is in large part due to her experience in building scalable data- and technology-driven businesses with a focus on automation and measurements.

At the young age of 14, Jana started her first home-based business which grew into a chain of stores and training centers only a few years later. The profits later financed her undergraduate degree. She started her career at GE Finance as Product Manager building new products, where she was first exposed to metrics-driven business principles. Within her first six months at the job, she became certified as a Six Sigma Black Belt, the leadership mastery in the Six Sigma project management, a new record in her home country Czech Republic. In a year, she became a Head of Product Managers and started to follow a life-long passion for building businesses leveraging advanced analytics, technology, and Big Data.

With 10 years of experience in general management and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, Jana decided to test all she knew and start her own business. Jana says: “I was Director at Citigroup working on one of the key strategic reengineering projects during the banking crisis. My project just got discussed on an analyst call. My career could not have gone better. I just had a baby and was not yet settled in my new role as mother when I got calling to start a new business. The timing was horrible, but I somehow knew I was ready and that I will somehow manage two life-changing events at the same time.” In 2010, she co-founded and became CEO of HStreaming, a Big Data startup that developed a unique real-time analytics platform for Hadoop. The technology enables businesses to make automated real-time decisions using unassisted machine learning, a break-through and first in the Big Data industry. HStreaming won many technology awards, among others Gartner’s Cool Vendor in Big Data and Infrastructure, predicting that HStreaming will be one of the companies that will change the face of Big Data.

Jana secured funding from Atlas Ventures and two years later sold the company to Adello. The HStreaming technology became the heart of Adello’s competitive advantage. She assumed the role of COO focusing on product management, US development, marketing, and hiring. Jana believes that at core of every exceptional company are extraordinary people. She hired every single new employee that joined the company. HStreaming/Adello won many awards and accolades under her leadership from Gartner, CRN, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and lately SVIEF 2015 Innovation Awards Top 30.

Jana has two young children and lives in San Francisco Bay Area. She mentors young women in technology.

Provide a brief biography of the nominated executive (up to 125 words):

Jana is a COO and Board Member of Adello, a mobile advertising company reshaping the mobile advertising industry as we know it today through data science and technology. In 2010 Jana founded HStreaming, a Big Data company that enables real-time decisioning on massive amounts of data. In 2013, HStreaming was acquired by Adello. Previously, Jana worked as Director at Citigroup, managing one of the key reengineering initiatives during the banking crisis of 2008 and Head of Credit Cards at Raiffeisenbank. Jana holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.