Ed McDonnell

Chief Revenue Officer Braze

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ed McDonnell is Chief Revenue Officer of Braze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BRZE), the customer engagement platform, a role he has held since July 2025. He arrived with an unusually concentrated credential: the whole of his recorded career has been spent selling marketing and work-management software, seven years of it at Salesforce, ending as Executive Vice President of Sales and Chief Revenue Officer for Marketing Cloud Sales — which is to say, running revenue for the incumbent product that Braze exists to compete with. He came to Braze directly from two years as Chief Revenue Officer of Asana, and into a company whose revenue had just passed $700 million a year and whose executive bench was turning over around him.

Career Highlights

• Chief Revenue Officer of Braze, Inc. since July 2025, named in the company’s 2026 proxy as one of six executive officers and as a named executive officer for fiscal 2026.
• Hired to lead all aspects of Braze’s global revenue operations, in a company reporting $738.2 million of revenue for the year ended 31 January 2026, up 24.4%, across 2,609 customers.
• Chief Revenue Officer of Asana from August 2023 to July 2025.
• Held multiple senior sales and revenue leadership roles at Salesforce from February 2016 to August 2023, latterly as Executive Vice President of Sales and Chief Revenue Officer for Marketing Cloud Sales.
• Holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Rhode Island.

Professional Journey

McDonnell took a Bachelor of Science in Finance at the University of Rhode Island. His recorded career begins in February 2016 at Salesforce, where he spent seven and a half years across a series of senior sales and revenue leadership roles, rising to Executive Vice President of Sales and Chief Revenue Officer for Marketing Cloud Sales. Marketing Cloud is the part of Salesforce that sells campaign orchestration, email and journey tooling to marketers — the same buyer, and largely the same budget, that Braze sells into.

In August 2023 he left to become Chief Revenue Officer of Asana, the work management company, where he stayed just under two years. Asana was at that point a public company managing the transition from bottom-up adoption to enterprise selling, and he appeared as part of its go-to-market story at the company’s October 2023 investor day.

Braze announced his hire on 5 June 2025, folded into its first-quarter results for fiscal 2026. Cofounder and chief executive Bill Magnuson framed it in terms of category fit rather than general sales pedigree: McDonnell, he said, had a strong track record at high-growth public SaaS businesses and an extensive background in software and customer engagement that would help solidify Braze as the leading customer engagement platform. He started on 7 July 2025.

The job he took on is large and the circumstances were not quiet. Four days before the announcement, Braze’s President and Chief Commercial Officer, Myles Kleeger, resigned, and Magnuson took the President title himself — so McDonnell’s arrival filled a gap at the top of the commercial organisation rather than adding a layer to it. In the same quarter Braze closed its acquisition of OfferFit, an AI decisioning company, and launched two new messaging channels. Over the fiscal year that followed, Braze reported revenue of $738.2 million, growth of 24.4%, dollar-based net retention of 109%, and 2,609 customers, 333 of them at $500,000 or more of annual recurring revenue — alongside a GAAP operating loss of $144.8 million, which is the tension a chief revenue officer at a company of this profile is hired to resolve.

He remains in the role. A Form 4 filed on 26 August 2026 reports him as Chief Revenue Officer as of that month, and the proxy filed in May 2026 lists him among the company’s executive officers.

Education

University of Rhode Island

Bachelor of Science, Finance