Kira Makagon

As a 12 year veteran of RingCentral, Kira Makagon is responsible for RingCentral’s worldwide product , AI innovation and marketing strategies.  She has been instrumental in defining RingCentral's multi-product portfolio and global reach, positioning the company at the forefront of the AI-powered communications and collaboration market.  Her visionary leadership has been crucial in propelling RingCentral's growth from pre-IPO to over $2.4 billion in annual recurring revenue.

As RingCentral’s Chief Marketing Officer, she is responsible for leading the company’s brand to demand global marketing strategy, including product marketing, corporate marketing, demand generation and events. Since 2012, Makagon has held the position of Chief Innovation Officer, overseeing global product, user experience, engineering, cloud operations, security, and IT. Makagon has led a number of market-first product innovations at global scale, such as RingCentral's mobile-first cloud PBX with integrated video meetings capabilities, now powered with AI for improved productivity and user experience.

Makagon spearheaded  RingCentral's open platform,  revolutionizing the industry by enabling highly customizable workflows through robust open APIs, enabling businesses to tailor their communication systems to their unique needs. Makagon led several acquisitions that led to making RingCentral the first cloud communications provider to have a truly unified solution across messaging, video, and phone enhanced with conversation intelligence, and bringing to market a native, AI-first, fully integrated customer experience solution seamlessly blending artificial intelligence with modern contact center, setting a new standard for customer interactions in the digital age.

In 2020, Makagon spearheaded the launch of RingCentral Video®, the company's proprietary video meetings solution. In 2021, she focused on launching RingCentral Ventures™, RingCentral's corporate ventures arm, which partners with exceptional founding teams and leading venture capitalists to reimagine the future of work through communications and collaboration. 

Makagon has received numerous awards, including a 2021 Aragon Research Women in Technology Award; a 2020 Silver Stevie for Most Innovative Woman of the Year – Technology; a 2019 Gold Women World Award for Excellence in Industry Woman of the Year: Cloud Computing/SaaS/Internet; a 2018 San Francisco Business Times Forever Influential Honor Roll award; a 2016 Silver Stevie for Female Executive of the Year; a 2016 Most Influential Women in Business from the San Francisco Business Times; a 2015 Women of Influence from the Silicon Valley Business Journal; and a 2015 Golden Bridge Business and Innovation award.

Throughout her career, Makagon has pioneered multiple transformational technologies and companies, and served as an advisor to entrepreneurs and early stage companies. Before joining RingCentral, Makagon founded and served as CEO and president of Red Aril, a real-time audience and media optimization platform, acquired by Hearst Corporation. Prior to that, she co-founded and held executive and board positions at flagship online marketing and CRM companies, including Octane Software, acquired by E.piphany (NASDAQ:EPNY), and Scopus Technology (NASDAQ:SCOP), acquired by Siebel (NASDAQ:SEBL).

Makagon is a regular lecturer at UC Berkeley and participant in industry panels and podcasts. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors at Calix and American Technion Society.