SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, June 2026 — Cartesia, an emerging leader in next-generation artificial intelligence infrastructure and foundation model development, has appointed Misty Mountain as its new Head of People.
Misty joins Cartesia at a pivotal stage in the company’s growth as it continues advancing groundbreaking AI architectures designed to power ubiquitous, interactive intelligence across a wide range of applications and devices. In her new role, she will lead the company’s people strategy, organizational development, talent acquisition, leadership effectiveness, culture, and workforce scaling initiatives as Cartesia expands its global presence.
Misty brings more than fifteen years of experience building and scaling people organizations across high-growth technology companies, venture-backed startups, and category-defining software businesses. Throughout her career, she has earned a reputation for creating high-performing cultures, designing scalable talent systems, and helping organizations navigate periods of rapid growth and transformation.
Prior to joining Cartesia, Misty served as Vice President, People at Forma, where she was the first people leader hired by the company. She built the entire People function and operating model from the ground up, leading organizational design, culture development, performance management, talent acquisition, people operations, and workforce strategy across a globally distributed team. Her leadership helped establish the foundation necessary for sustainable growth while maintaining employee engagement and organizational effectiveness.
Before Forma, Misty was Head of People at Chorus.ai, where she reported directly to the CEO and led all aspects of Human Resources and Recruiting. During a period of rapid expansion, she developed foundational people programs, talent acquisition processes, onboarding frameworks, performance management systems, and employee engagement initiatives across teams located in San Francisco, Boston, Salt Lake City, Toronto, and Tel Aviv. She also played a key role in supporting the company’s successful acquisition by ZoomInfo.
Earlier in her career, Misty spent nearly five years with Sojern, helping the organization scale from approximately 100 employees to more than 600 employees across multiple global offices including San Francisco, New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Dubai, Mexico City, and Istanbul. During her tenure, she held progressively senior positions including People Business Partner, People Operations Manager, and Director, People, building critical programs in employee engagement, compensation, performance management, organizational design, leadership development, recognition, and learning.
She also held Human Resources roles with HotelTonight, BrightRoll (later acquired by Yahoo!), and Yelp, where she developed broad expertise across talent management, employee relations, recruiting, culture development, and organizational effectiveness.
At Cartesia, Misty’s experience building people functions from the ground up aligns closely with the company’s ambitious vision. Founded by researchers from Stanford AI Lab, Cartesia is pioneering State Space Models (SSMs), a new class of AI architecture designed to enable more efficient and scalable foundation models across text, audio, video, image, and time-series applications.
As the company continues to attract world-class engineering, research, and business talent, Misty’s leadership will be instrumental in creating the organizational capabilities, leadership frameworks, and employee experiences required to support Cartesia’s next stage of growth and innovation.
Her appointment underscores the increasing importance of people strategy as AI companies scale rapidly while competing for highly specialized talent in one of the world’s most dynamic technology sectors.
About Cartesia
Cartesia is an artificial intelligence company building the next generation of foundation model architectures. Founded by researchers from Stanford AI Lab, the company pioneered State Space Models (SSMs), a breakthrough approach that enables highly efficient, scalable, and high-performing AI systems across multiple modalities including text, audio, video, images, and time-series data. Cartesia’s mission is to create ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that can run wherever people are, powering the future of AI applications and experiences.
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