Dan Faulkner

Chief Executive Officer SmartBear

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Dan Faulkner is Chief Executive Officer of SmartBear, the software quality, API and testing tools company, promoted to the role in January 2025 after joining as Chief Product Officer in 2021. He is a linguist by training — a Manchester linguistics degree and an Edinburgh master’s in speech and language processing — which took him into thirteen years at Nuance Communications, the company that defined commercial speech recognition. That background matters for where he is steering SmartBear now: toward agentic QA and AI-driven application integrity, which is to say toward software that tests software, a problem in machine understanding rather than in tooling.

Career Highlights

• Promoted to Chief Executive Officer of SmartBear in January 2025, having joined as Chief Product Officer in 2021.
• Steering product strategy toward agentic QA and AI-driven application integrity testing.
• Spent thirteen years at Nuance Communications, rising to Senior Vice President and General Manager.
• Served as Chief Technology Officer of Plannuh from 2018 to 2021.
• Led multiple enterprise-level acquisitions and built global go-to-market strategies.
• Holds a master’s in Speech and Language Processing from Edinburgh and a bachelor’s in Linguistics from Manchester.

Professional Journey

Faulkner studied linguistics at the University of Manchester and took a master’s in speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh, one of the strongest programmes in the field. That led him to Nuance Communications in 2005, where he spent thirteen years as the company built the speech recognition technology behind dictation software, automotive voice systems, and clinical documentation. He rose to VP and General Manager of Voice to Text and subsequently to Senior Vice President and General Manager, leading multiple enterprise acquisitions and global go-to-market work along the way.

He left Nuance in 2018 to become Chief Technology Officer at Plannuh, a marketing planning and budgeting software company, and joined SmartBear as Chief Product Officer in 2021. SmartBear occupies an unglamorous but structurally important position in software development, supplying the tools teams use to test applications and APIs and to verify that what they have built actually works — a portfolio assembled over years and used very widely.

In January 2025 he was promoted to Chief Executive Officer. His stated direction is agentic QA and application integrity: the argument that software testing, historically the most labour-intensive and least automated part of the development cycle, is among the functions AI can most plausibly transform. Conventional test automation requires someone to specify in advance what to check and to maintain those specifications as the application changes, which is why testing consumes so much engineering time and why so much of it gets skipped. Agentic approaches aim at systems that explore an application, form expectations about how it should behave, and identify departures from them without being told what to look for.

That is a problem in machine understanding of intent, which is closer to Faulkner’s original discipline than to conventional developer tooling — making the AI direction at SmartBear a return to the field he trained in rather than a departure from it.

Education

University of Edinburgh

Master’s degree, Speech and Language Processing

University of Manchester

Bachelor’s degree, Linguistics