Parallel Domain Welcomes Zack Novak as CEO
We bet the company, and it paid off
A little more than a year ago, we made a defining decision. We walked away from the procedural environment creation approach we had spent years building and shifted our entire focus to a scalable reconstruction method. It was a genuine bet-the-company move.
The result was PD Replica. It wasn’t just a new product. It represented a fundamentally different way to simulate the real world. PD Replica turned out to be both more scalable and more performant, enabling our customers to test and validate their autonomous systems faster, across more scenarios, and with greater fidelity than ever before. It fueled a year of massive growth across testing and validation use cases. That conviction is now the engine behind everything we’re doing.
The market is shifting in our direction
Something fundamental is happening in autonomy right now. The industry’s shift from modular perception-planning-control stacks toward end-to-end learned models is driving significantly greater demand for high-fidelity simulation data. When your entire autonomy stack is learned, the quality and diversity of your simulation environment becomes the bottleneck, and that’s exactly the problem PD Replica was built to solve.
This isn’t just our view. Public presentations from Waymo, Tesla, and Waabi have confirmed the central importance of simulation and 3D scene reconstruction for achieving production-ready autonomous deployment. The validation is real, and it’s accelerating demand across the board.
Our core autonomous vehicle customers are pulling harder than ever, but the opportunity no longer stops at passenger cars. Over the past year, we’ve seen real adoption from companies building drones, eVTOL aircraft, last-mile delivery robots, and agricultural autonomy systems. The underlying challenge they all share, rigorously testing autonomous systems at scale before they ever touch the real world, is universal.
Why we’re bringing on a CEO now
Kevin and our Board looked at the progress the team has made, the traction PD Replica has earned, and the scale of the market ahead, and recognized that the moment demands dedicated operational and commercial leadership to scale the business.
Zack Novak joins Parallel Domain as CEO to build the operational and commercial engine the company now requires; scaling not just go-to-market, but the organization as a whole. Zack has spent his career scaling industrial AI and enterprise software businesses, most recently at Uptake and Quantix, where he drove go-to-market execution in complex, technical markets. His experience is precisely what we need to capture the opportunity across automotive and the new industries pulling us forward.
Kevin goes deeper, not sideways
Kevin McNamara isn’t stepping back. He’s going deeper, moving fully into product, engineering, and working directly with customers to accelerate the value PD Replica delivers.
It’s also where the company needs him most. The technology landscape in reconstruction, simulation, and AI is evolving rapidly. We fully expect we’ll need to reinvent aspects of our approach again as the field advances. That kind of foresight requires a founder who is close to the product and close to customers, not one managing a P&L from a distance. Kevin will spend his time with engineering, product, and the people who use PD Replica every day, making sure Parallel Domain stays at the frontier.
A partnership built to scale
Zack drives go-to-market and commercial execution. Kevin stays embedded in the technology and with customers. Together, they form a partnership designed to let Parallel Domain do two things at once: scale aggressively into a rapidly expanding market and continue to lead on the product and technology that got us here.
We’ve never felt momentum like this before. We’re ready to move.
Welcome to Parallel Domain, Zack.
