Praveen Penmetsa

CEO

Praveen’s passion for helping other audacious visionaries through complex product development and his firm belief that "its not just what we do, it's how we do it" is the drive behind Motivo. Praveen brings over two decades of hands-on experience in translating creative visions into products. His formative years in building racecars and new mobility solutions under highly compressed timelines eventually resulted in the development of the Motivo Way and his philosophy on managing innovation. He loves the creative energy that permeates the product engineering lifecycle especially on seemingly impossible projects. Outside of Motivo, you will find Praveen at the local race track with his vintage BMW.

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Akil Thomas

Financial Controller

Akil joined Motivo as our Controller in July 2018 and leads our finance and accounting team. He is responsible for driving our wider team towards financial growth while maintaining our accounting team's high standards for rigor and client experience.  Akil has spent the last 6 years at startups in the tech space improving their financial systems and growing revenues in excess of $30MM.  He holds degrees in accounting and finance including an M.B.A. from Pepperdine University. Akil spends his down time backcountry skiing in the Eastern Sierras, surfing the California coastline, or Scuba Diving.

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Justin Almeleh

Director of Business Development & Client Experience

Justin brings over 10 years of aerospace and product development success to the Motivo team. He has spearheaded projects ranging from the development of eVTOLs to autonomous tractors, and he harnesses the rigors of his days in Flight Test to drive project capture and execution across the company. Whether helping our clients realize their vision or applying foresight to improving Motivo's operations, Justin’s strategy is focused and purposeful. He takes the same mindset to his interests outside of work including sailing, SCUBA diving, and climbing Yosemite’s most challenging rock walls. Justin holds advanced degrees in Aerospace and Systems Engineering.

Allen Goad

General Manager

Allen’s passion for leading growth in complex high-performance companies has led to 25 years of experience leading high profile public and private organizations in the aerospace, defense, advanced robotics, service, and industrial markets. He is an accomplished leader with expertise in business and operations leadership, sales, engineering, mergers & acquisitions, restructuring, and business development. Allen holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Education and Chemistry from Arkansas State University, a Master Black Belt from Sigma Pro, and a Presidential and Key Executive M.B.A. from Pepperdine University. Outside of Motivo you can find Allen engaged in a lot of different hobbies from enjoying time with his family, 4x4 off-roading, riding motorcycles, to building, driving, and racing high performance cars.  

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Chris Dunham

Director of Organizational Development

Chris champions the development of Motivo’s diverse product engineering teams that include managers, PhD’s, engineers, hackers and manufacturing groups. His role spans recruiting, culture, development, performance management and HR.  He strives to identify, motivate and support the Motivo team members as they work through the project challenges. He draws on over 10 years of people-focused roles in fields ranging from nonprofit to high tech and thrives in a fast paced, highly dynamic environment that is Motivo. Chris loves to experiment with nontraditional methods of identifying and attracting talented folks, developing leaders, and supporting the team. He’s an insatiable learner and outside of work he often pursues new and experience-enhancing hobbies – most recently roasting artisan coffee. 

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Dr. Zachary Omohundro

Senior Scientist

Dr. Zachary has a double degree in electrical and mechanical engineering, and a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon. He has worked for a NASA subcontractor and a start-up prior to Motivo. He specializes in highly modular robotic architectures, self-reconfigurable robots; multiple robots that not only collaborate, but mechanically join together to form a more capable robot; robots with parallel kinematic structures; using analog control and oscillation to achieve high level functions such as a walking gate; tighter integration of electrical and mechanical components; systematic methods of evaluating engineering trade-offs across multiple disciplines; sensor fusion techniques and designing for fault tolerance/redundancy in sensors. He ensures that even the most complex system design is extremely practical so it can be quickly validated and implemented.

Ridiculously Fast

Our mission is to deliver better products, faster. Motivo is vertically integrated with highly skilled designers, electrical, mechanical and software engineers and fabricators working together in tightly knit teams under the same roof - resulting in development timelines that are often 3x faster than usual

Extremely Diverse

Our team has been carefully selected to bring extremely diverse skills to each project, allowing us to bring depth and breadth to each project. We brainstorm, design, engineer, solder, wire, code, print, sew, weld, machine, assemble, and test the first prototype and help the transition to full-volume production.

Constantly Creative

We don't like the word "impossible". We begin each day by challenging traditional thinking and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. We look at things differently, we embrace the unconventional and we bring creativity to every single stage of the product development cycle