Authors

Pranathi Tipparam

Pranathi Tipparam leads growth programs at Orb focused on AI pricing and usage-based-billing. She writes about SaaS & AI monetization, pricing models, billing and subscription management, and the trends shaping how software companies turn product usage into revenue. Before Orb, Pranathi held growth and integrated marketing roles at Gem and Rippling and previously worked in marketing operations at Cisco Meraki. She holds a BS in Marketing from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Eric Murphy

Senior Engineering Manager

Eric Murphy is an Engineering leader at Orb, where he owns the features for modeling and evolving pricing. Prior to Orb, he was an Engineering Manager at Even, an early-stage fintech company that was acquired in 2021 and is now part of OnePay. At Even, Eric had firsthand experience building and maintaining a billing system in-house which led him to start working at Orb in late 2023 to build a billing platform fast-paced companies can rely on. Eric holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Purdue and currently resides in San Francisco.

Ellen Perfect

Product Marketing Lead

Ellen Perfect is Product Marketing Lead at Orb, where she owns positioning and messaging for the platform and leads product launches. She writes about pricing models for AI and SaaS companies, and what the best AI companies have learned about monetization. Ellen brings a decade of B2B go-to-market experience: product marketing at Census and at Lattice, where she launched the product into new industries, geographies, and buying groups, and GTM strategy consulting at Forrester, where she advised SaaS and high-tech companies on positioning and ideal customer profile. Ellen holds a BA in International Relations from Claremont McKenna College.

Alvaro Morales

CEO & Co-founder

Alvaro Morales is the co-founder and CEO of Orb. Before founding the company in 2021, he spent five years at Asana in software engineering roles, leading growth engineering and overseeing key product teams. After working through pricing & packaging challenges firsthand during that growth, he co-founded Orb as part of the inaugural South Park Commons Founder Fellowship. Alvaro holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from MIT. Born and raised in Lima, Peru, he has called San Francisco home since 2016.

Kelly Hofmann

Software Engineer, Pricing Lifecycle

Kelly Hofmann is a Software Engineer on Orb's Pricing Lifecycle team, the group that turns product usage into prices, subscriptions, and invoices. She writes about billing from both sides of the ledger: before engineering, she spent four years at Slack as its first revenue accountant, running usage-based billing, invoicing, and collections by hand, then moved into billing product management. Wanting to build the systems she had been operating, she went through a software engineering bootcamp in 2019 and went on to build software at LaunchDarkly before joining Orb in 2025. Kelly began her career auditing at KPMG and holds a degree in accounting from San Diego State University.

Josh Buckler

VP of Sales

Josh Buckler is Head of Sales at Orb, where he works with companies navigating the pricing, packaging, contracting, and commercial complexities that come with modern software monetization. He brings nearly two decades of experience selling enterprise software and building go-to-market organizations. As SVP of Sales at Everlaw, he founded the sales team and helped scale the business while growing the sales organization.

Lucia Zhang

Product Lead

Lucia Zhang is a Product Lead at Orb, where she works across the finance and monetization side of the product, including invoicing, revenue recognition and ASC 606 compliance, reconciliation, collections, finance integrations, and pricing simulations. Her work focuses on making sophisticated pricing and billing models operationally reliable for finance and product teams. Before Orb, Lucia was a product manager at Gem and Dropbox, where she worked on Dropbox Business and Enterprise and the DocSend acquisition. She began her career working on payments at Visa. Lucia holds a BA in Economics and a BS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

James Jaconetti

Head of Customer Success

James Jaconetti joined Orb to lead the Customer Success organization, leading implementation, technical support, customer success, and account management. He has spent a decade running post-sales at infrastructure companies where revenue scales with consumption. At Cloudflare, James scaled the enterprise customer success organization as the business grew, and later led global customer success at Druva, where his team played a key role in retention across thousands of customers. He has also held customer success leadership roles at Nightfall AI and Front. James holds a BA in English from The Ohio State University.

Justin Chuan

Head of Design

Justin Chuan is Head of Design at Orb, where he leads the team behind the brand and product for Orb's revenue design platform. He joined in early 2024 to lead brand design and Orb's 2026 rebrand. Justin has been a design leader for over a decade: he was the Director of Brand Design at Netlify, where he built the brand design team and led the company's identity overhaul. Before that, he built and led the brand team at BuildingConnected through its acquisition by Autodesk, and was at Sharethrough, growing from its first visual designer to leading the team.

Andrew Budiman

Head of Infrastructure Engineering

Andrew Budiman is Head of Infrastructure at Orb, where he leads the engineering systems responsible for ingesting and processing the usage data behind usage-based billing. His work focuses on building reliable, high-scale infrastructure where the accuracy of every event directly affects billing. Before Orb, Andrew spent eight years at Asana, where he helped build and scale the data infrastructure powering Asana’s real-time collaboration. Earlier in his career, he was a software engineer at Amazon working on DynamoDB. Andrew holds a BS in Computer Science from UC San Diego.

Kshitij Grover

CTO

Kshitij Grover is the co-founder and CTO of Orb. Before founding the company in 2021, he spent four years at Asana leading the real-time infrastructure team. After working firsthand on the systems behind a fast-scaling product, he started Orb as part of the inaugural South Park Commons Founder Fellowship. Kshitij hosts Tractable, Orb's podcast, where he speaks with engineering leaders at companies like Cloudflare, Honeycomb, and Modal about building and scaling technical products. He also speaks often on usage-based billing, pricing infrastructure, and AI monetization at various conferences at shows. A Bay Area native, Kshitij holds a BS in Computer Science from Caltech and has been a Sequoia Scout since 2018.

Bryan Schmitz

Bryan Schmitz is VP of Finance at Orb and brings more than 15 years of experience working on the finance and operational side of SaaS billing. Across roles at Puppet, Sauce Labs, Mezmo, and Very Good Security, he has led work spanning revenue recognition, pricing and packaging changes, billing migrations, COGS analysis, deal desk, and quote-to-cash. Before joining Orb, Bryan also served on the company’s product advisory board, bringing firsthand experience with the challenges finance teams face as consumption-based businesses scale. He began his career in audit at KPMG and holds a BA and Master of Professional Accountancy from Montana State University.

sri raghavan-hernandez

sri raghavan-hernandez is a Founding Engineer and Technical Architect at Orb, where he sets technical direction for Orb's platform and security efforts. Prior to Orb, sri worked in Engineering at Asana for 8 years - as an engineer, engineering manager, and finally a group tech lead for the teams supporting Asana's largest and most complex customers. sri collaborated with Kshitij and Alvaro while at Asana, and eventually found his way to Orb in 2022. Originally from Texas, sri holds a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and currently lives in Oakland, California.