Diagrid Names Sam Yang Chief Executive Officer

Co-Founder Mark Fussell Moves to Chief Product Officer, While Fellow Co-Founder Yaron Schneider Continues as Chief Technology Officer 

FEDERAL WAY, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Diagrid, developer of the world's most reliable foundation for mission-critical workflows and autonomous AI agents and the company behind the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), today announced that Sam Yang has been promoted from president to chief executive officer. He succeeds co-founder Mark Fussell, who becomes chief product officer. Co-founder Yaron Schneider remains chief technology officer.

Yang joined Diagrid as president earlier this year. As CEO, he will help set the company’s business direction, with an immediate focus on a new question most enterprises currently face: what is stopping AI agents from reaching production?

Fussell will devote his time almost entirely to product, including Diagrid Catalyst. Schneider continues to lead Diagrid’s technical vision across Catalyst and the open-source Dapr project, which he co-created with Fussell.

“A surprisingly low number of enterprises are actually running agents reliably in production, where a crash, timeout or audit request can inadvertently undo weeks of work,” Yang said. “This is the business problem Diagrid is made to solve. Mark and Yaron laid the foundation with Dapr and Catalyst, and now my job is to get it in front of every team trying to fully leverage the power of AI agents in production.”

“Taking on the chief product officer role will let me spend every day on the work I care about most,” said Fussell. “Sam has the proven ability to help us scale the business, which will free me to go deeper on how teams can build durable, verifiable agents. Yaron and I launched Diagrid to make distributed systems easier to build, and that mission remains the same.”

Yang brings more than two decades of go-to-market leadership in enterprise software. Before joining Diagrid, he led global sales at Zilliz and served as president of field operations at People.ai. He previously ran the go-to-market organization at data.ai, formerly App Annie, and he has also held roles at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and PeopleSoft.

Fussell and Schneider co-created Dapr, now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-graduated project running in production across thousands of companies. Schneider also chairs the Agentic AI Foundation Workflows Working Group.

About Diagrid

Diagrid helps enterprises build reliable and secure distributed systems and AI agents. Founded by the creators of the open-source Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), Diagrid provides the agentic infrastructure layer that delivers durable execution, secure service-to-service communication, AI orchestration, and cryptographic trust for modern cloud-native and AI applications. Its flagship product, Diagrid Catalyst, combines durable workflows with advanced identity, access controls, and zero-trust style governance so teams can run long-lived, mission-critical agent workloads without losing state or compromising security. Diagrid is a leading maintainer of Dapr within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and a member of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).

Organizations in highly regulated sectors such as financial services and healthcare use Diagrid to orchestrate multi-agent workflows, enforce fine-grained data access, and cryptographically attest which agents did what and when across their infrastructure. Learn more at https://www.diagrid.io/.