CoLab Fortifies Leadership to Scale AI Engineering Revolution

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland – May 06, 2026 – CoLab, the rapidly growing technology firm building an AI-powered operating system for hardware development, has announced two strategic senior hires poised to steer the company through its next critical phase of expansion. Tom Greever, a renowned design leader and author, joins as Senior Vice President of Design, while Jessie Wheeler, a proven scale-up operator with experience at Salesforce and a multi-billion dollar exit, takes the helm as Senior Vice President of Operations.

The appointments come at a pivotal moment for the Newfoundland-based company. Fresh off its recognition by Deloitte as one of North America's fastest-growing technology companies—boasting a 1,730% three-year revenue growth—CoLab is moving decisively to translate its explosive momentum into sustainable, long-term market leadership. These hires signal a deliberate strategy to invest in the core pillars of operational excellence and human-centered design, ensuring the company's foundation is as robust as its technology.

“This is a pivotal time for the company, and we welcome the addition of Tom and Jessie,” said Adam Keating, Co-Founder and CEO of CoLab. “Investing in design and operational rigor are intentional, strategic moves as we build for the future.”

Forging an Operating System for Scale

The task of harnessing CoLab's rapid growth falls to Jessie Wheeler. As SVP of Operations, she is charged with building the internal operating system that will enable the company to scale efficiently and predictably. Wheeler brings a formidable track record, having helped guide Own Company to an exit valued at over $2 billion before driving strategic initiatives at global software giant Salesforce. Her expertise lies in transforming high-growth momentum into durable, repeatable processes.

At CoLab, Wheeler will serve as a force multiplier, implementing the systems and structures required for sharper alignment, faster execution, and greater accountability across the organization. This move is critical as CoLab looks to deploy the $72 million in Series C funding it raised in late 2025. With significant capital and a product seeing immense demand, the focus shifts to execution and building a business that can support its expanding customer base, which already includes industry leaders like Ford, Lockheed Martin, and Johnson Controls.

“I’m excited to join the team at CoLab and bring in my operational expertise when the company is primed for expansion,” says Wheeler. “By scaling what works and putting more process integrity in place, the next phase of growth looks bright.” Her role is not just about managing growth but about architecting it, ensuring that as the company's complexity increases, its agility and effectiveness are amplified, not diminished.

Championing the Human Touch in an AI World

While Wheeler builds the company's operational backbone, Tom Greever is tasked with shaping its soul. In an era where many software companies are trending towards headless, API-driven systems, CoLab is making a contrarian bet by doubling down on the human experience. Greever's appointment as SVP of Design underscores the company's core philosophy: that advanced engineering will always require a human-in-the-loop for critical decision-making, augmented by teams of AI agents.

Greever is a globally recognized voice in the design community, best known for his book Articulating Design Decisions, which coaches designers on communicating the value of their work to non-designers. His experience mentoring teams at companies like Apple, Porsche, and Facebook makes him uniquely suited to elevate design as a strategic differentiator at CoLab. He will lead the evolution of the company’s design practice, establishing the principles and systems needed to deliver a world-class user experience for a complex, platform-oriented product.

“I’m looking forward to helping the company build the structures that allow its design quality to improve as the organization grows,” says Greever. “Design is a deeply human experience, and I was drawn to CoLab’s desire to keep their engineering platform human-first while integrating the best of what technology and AI has to offer.” This approach is crucial in a field like mechanical engineering, where intuition, context, and expert judgment are irreplaceable assets that AI must complement, not replace.

From Viral Waitlist to Industry Standard

The strategic importance of these hires is amplified by the runaway success of CoLab's first AI agent, AutoReview. Launched in 2025, AutoReview acts as an AI peer checker for engineers, automatically reviewing 2D drawings and 3D CAD models against company standards, manufacturability rules, and past lessons learned. It flags everything from missing dimensions and tolerance errors to repeat mistakes, freeing engineers from tedious, non-value-added work that consumes an estimated 23% of their time.

The market's response has been overwhelming, with a waitlist for AutoReview quickly swelling to over 50,000 engineers. This viral demand highlights a massive, unmet need in the hardware development industry and validates CoLab's product direction. However, it also presents a significant scaling challenge. The influx of users and data requires a robust operational framework to manage onboarding and support, as well as a sophisticated design approach to ensure the AI's outputs are intuitive, actionable, and seamlessly integrated into the engineer's workflow.

CoLab is navigating a competitive landscape where established CAD and PLM giants like Siemens and PTC are actively integrating generative AI into their legacy platforms. CoLab’s differentiation lies in its purpose-built, collaborative platform and its focus on augmenting human review processes. By capturing expert knowledge as a natural part of an engineer's day-to-day work, the platform creates a powerful feedback loop that makes its AI agents smarter and more tailored over time. The new leadership is key to hardening this competitive advantage, ensuring the product experience and operational delivery are as innovative as the underlying technology.