Harper Appoints Lelah Manz CEO as Co-Founder Stephen Goldberg Moves to Board

Harper appointed Lelah Manz as chief executive officer, effective immediately, succeeding co-founder Stephen Goldberg, who will remain on the board, PR Newswire reported on October 26, 2026. Manz joins the Denver company from Akamai Technologies, where she was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data and Shared Services.

Manz's Akamai Record and Harper's Momentum

Manz spent nearly two decades at Akamai Technologies, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data and Shared Services, where she led a global team delivering data, AI, and shared platform capabilities. During her tenure, Akamai grew from a $250 million content delivery provider into a $4 billion global platform spanning security, compute, and data services. She also serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at APIContext.

"Harper has done something the rest of the industry is still trying to figure out: it put the database, the cache, and the code inside the exact same process," Manz said. "Harper eliminates that latency by keeping data and logic in the same local memory space, answering queries in milliseconds with zero network hops."

Harper said the appointment follows 12 months in which it was named a Sample Vendor in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce (2026) in the Front-End Cloud category, received an Honorable Mention in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms (2026), released its core technology under an open-source Apache 2.0 license at OpenJS Conf NA, and launched Harper Fabric, its managed cloud platform offering multi-region replication, intelligent routing, and automated failover.

"Taking the company to the next stage requires someone who has scaled a platform business to billions in revenue," Goldberg said. "I believe Lelah is that person and I could not be more confident in handing her the keys, and I look forward to supporting her from the board."

Jay Hirsh, Managing Partner of Break Trail Ventures, said the board conducted a thorough search and that Manz stood out as the leader to take Harper from category pioneer to category leader.

Harper's Funding and Platform Record

According to akta.pro company records, Harper has four funding rounds on record: a 2024-06 private equity round led by Serent Capital, a 2024-03 non-equity assistance round led by 5G Open Innovation Lab, a 2020-12 seed of $3.4 million, and a 2019-03 seed of $5.3 million with 2 investors. The same records list total funding of $8.7 million, a headcount range of 11-50, and a revenue estimate of $10 million-$25 million. Harper was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Denver.

Harper's Open-Source Releases

The same records list a 2026-06 product launch of Harper 5.1, introducing native Model Context Protocol server support and a layered AI stack, and a 2026-04 launch of Harper 5.0 with a fully open-source Apache 2.0 core, RocksDB as a native storage engine, and a source-available Harper Pro tier for self-hosted distributed deployments. In 2025-10, Harper open-sourced its composable full-stack web application platform under Apache 2.0 at JSConf North America 2025.