Centrifuge Strengthens Executive Team With New COO and Head of Product

We’ve appointed two distinguished leaders to Centrifuge’s executive team! Former BlueYard CFO Julia Merkel has been named Centrifuge's COO, while Sonam Joshi, a veteran of UBS, Google, and Amazon, will lead Centrifuge's Product team.

The news comes after our $15 million Series A raise last month. Both Merkel and Joshi will help Centrifuge scale its onchain asset management strategy and vision for democratizing institutional DeFi.

"I'm excited to welcome Julia and Sonam to our executives," says Lucas Vogelsang, Co-founder of Centrifuge. "They join at a perfect time as Centrifuge looks to scale to meet the widespread, increasing demand for tokenized real-world assets."

Julia Merkel joins Centrifuge after serving as CFO for BlueYard Capital, a crypto native venture capital investor in Centrifuge, for the past nine years. In this role, Merkel was closely involved in managing the finance team and overseeing the firm's operations. Prior to BlueYard, she was focused on transaction advisory services at EY for almost a decade across Europe and the US.

Merkel says the opportunity at the intersection of TradFi and DeFi drew her to Centrifuge.

"The onchain asset management space is very exciting and has tremendous momentum, in large part due to Centrifuge," said Merkel. "I'm looking forward to helping bridge the gaps between DeFi and TradFi while democratizing access to finance for all."

At Centrifuge, Merkel will be focused on onboarding new asset managers, customer experience, streamlining systems and processing funds.

Sonam Joshi comes to Centrifuge from serving as a Global Product Lead at Google, Product Manager at Amazon and Director of Product at Abra. Joshi also worked in management positions at UBS for seven years across fixed income and credit departments. Based in Portugal, she has an undergraduate degree from The London School of Economics and an MBA from London Business School.

"I'm looking forward to furthering Centrifuge's industry-leading products in the months and years to come," says Joshi. "As we reach more and more users, it'll be vital that Centrifuge continues to lead the way when it comes to its range of financial products and innovation."

About Centrifuge

Founded in 2017, Centrifuge creates better technology for financial products. Centrifuge provides asset managers a way to tokenize, manage and distribute their funds onchain and investors better access to a diversified portfolio of high-quality tokenized assets.