NextSilicon Appoints Kit Chee and Kristin Owens to Lead Global Sales and Marketing

NextSilicon has appointed Kit Chee as chief sales officer and Kristin Owens as chief marketing officer, both reporting to Rupal Hollenbeck, president and chief business officer, citybiz reported on November 5, 2026. The company said the appointments strengthen its global commercial leadership as it expands deployments of its Maverick-2 accelerator platform.

Chee to Lead Global Sales Organization

Chee will lead NextSilicon's global sales organization, focusing on revenue growth and strategic customer relationships across AI, high-performance computing and enterprise markets. He brings 33 years of experience in semiconductors, data centers, cloud computing and high-performance computing sales.

Chee spent much of his career at Intel, most recently leading cloud, enterprise and HPC sales. He subsequently held chief revenue officer and chief business development and operations officer positions at Ampere before joining Check Point Software Technologies as vice president of global strategic alliances and field enablement.

Owens to Oversee Global Marketing

Owens will oversee global marketing, including brand strategy, demand generation and communications. She brings 26 years of experience in marketing, business development and operations across established technology companies and startups, including Intel, Cerebras Systems, Supermicro, KPMG and Avnet.

Most recently, Owens served as vice president of field and partner marketing at Check Point Software Technologies, where she also held the role of interim chief marketing officer. Hollenbeck said of the pair: "Kit has spent three decades building and leading global data center sales organizations, and he knows how to build a repeatable commercial engine." She added that Owens "brings decades of marketing depth and experience, and will partner with Kit to create awareness and convert that to interest and deployments."

Maverick-2 Moves Toward Broader Adoption

NextSilicon said the appointments come as it moves its Maverick-2 platform from early deployments toward broader customer adoption. Maverick-2 uses a software-defined hardware architecture designed to adapt to workloads during execution, allowing existing applications to run without software rewrites.

The company said its architecture has been used in high-performance computing environments for more than eight years, including at Sandia National Laboratories, where it passed production acceptance testing using unmodified code. NextSilicon is also expanding its sales, field engineering and customer success teams to support customer deployments.

Sandia and Cornelis Deployments Behind the Hires

According to akta.pro company records, NextSilicon achieved full system acceptance of the Spectra supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories in May 2026, deploying 128 NextSilicon accelerators under the Department of Energy's Vanguard program for the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing initiative. The same records show a June 2026 strategic partnership with Cornelis Networks to integrate NextSilicon accelerators with high-performance interconnect fabric for HPC and AI cluster deployments.

Hollenbeck's Earlier Commercial Role

NextSilicon appointed Hollenbeck as president and chief business officer in August 2026 to lead its global commercial strategy, including sales, marketing and partnerships, FinancialContent Business Page reported. Lightspeed Commerce appointed Hollenbeck, president and chief business officer of NextSilicon, to its board of directors effective October 1, 2026, Pulse 2.0 reported; she previously led go-to-market operations at Check Point, Cerebras and Oracle, and served at Intel.