AJ Bruno

Founder & CEO QuotaPath

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

AJ Bruno is the co-founder and chief executive of QuotaPath, a Philadelphia-based platform that builds and administers sales compensation plans, tracks commissions and gives reps visibility into what they have earned. The problem it addresses is mundane and expensive: most revenue organisations run their commission structures in spreadsheets, reps do not trust the numbers, and finance spends the end of every month reconciling them. Bruno’s case for the category is that a compensation plan is a strategy document rather than a payroll chore, and that if the plan is legible to the people it governs it changes what they sell. He came to it as a second act. He had already co-founded TrendKite, a PR analytics company he helped grow to about 250 employees and over $20M in annual recurring revenue before Cision bought it for $225M in 2019, and before that had started his career selling for Meltwater, an experience he has credited, along with a bad manager, for pushing him into founding companies.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded QuotaPath in 2018 alongside Cole Evetts, now COO, and Eric Heydenberk, now CTO, and has led it as CEO since.
• Raised more than $62M for QuotaPath, including a $21.3M Series A led by Insight Partners and a $41M Series B.
• Grew QuotaPath to roughly 1,000 customers using the platform for compensation planning, commission automation and sales performance management.
• Co-founded TrendKite in 2012 and served as its president, scaling the PR analytics business to about 250 employees and more than $20M in annual recurring revenue.
• Sold TrendKite to Cision for $225M in 2019, one of the larger Austin software exits of that year.
• Began his career in sales at Meltwater, the media intelligence company, which gave him the domain knowledge behind TrendKite.
• Speaks regularly at HubSpot’s INBOUND and UNBOUND conferences and co-hosts the Topline podcast on revenue growth and sales leadership.

Professional Journey

Bruno grew up in Pittsburgh in an aviation household, his father a pilot and his mother a flight attendant, and went to Penn State, graduating from the Schreyer Honors College in 2007 with an economics degree from the Smeal College of Business after a period studying abroad in Italy. His first job out of university was in sales at Meltwater, the media monitoring company. He has been candid in later interviews that the experience was formative in two directions at once: it taught him the media intelligence market in detail, and a difficult manager convinced him he would rather run a company than work inside one.

TrendKite followed in 2012. The premise was that public relations was one of the last marketing functions with no credible analytics layer, measured in clip counts and advertising-equivalent value rather than in business outcomes, and that attribution data could put PR on the same footing as paid media. Bruno co-founded the company and served as president, and it scaled quickly out of Austin, reaching roughly 250 employees and more than $20M in annual recurring revenue. In 2019 Cision, the incumbent in the space Meltwater competed in, acquired TrendKite for $225M.

QuotaPath began in 2018, before that exit closed, and pulled on the other half of his experience. Having spent a career in and around sales organisations, Bruno had watched compensation plans get designed in a finance spreadsheet, communicated badly and then disputed monthly by the people they were meant to motivate. He founded the company with Cole Evetts and Eric Heydenberk, and the product deliberately targets both sides of that friction: finance and RevOps get plan design, approvals and automated calculation; reps get a live view of attainment and earnings they can check themselves. Investors backed the thesis, with Insight Partners leading a $21.3M Series A and a subsequent $41M Series B taking total funding past $62M, and the platform now serves around a thousand customers.

Alongside the operating role, Bruno has built a public presence in the go-to-market community, speaking at HubSpot’s INBOUND and UNBOUND events, co-hosting the Topline podcast on revenue leadership, and returning to Penn State as an alumnus to talk about the path from Smeal to two venture-backed companies.

Education

Pennsylvania State University

Bachelor’s degree, Economics, Smeal College of Business and Schreyer Honors College, 2007