Joe Gaska

Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Data and AI GRAX (Ascendx)

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Joe Gaska is a technology entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience founding and scaling enterprise software companies, both of them built on the same conviction: that the data a business generates inside someone else’s platform belongs to the business, not the platform. He founded GRAX in 2018 to let companies capture, preserve and act on the full history of their Salesforce data — including the changes that conventional backup and archive tools silently discard — and led it as chief executive until the company merged with CapStorm under Ascendx in a deal completed at the end of October 2025. He is now chief product officer for data and AI at the combined business, under chief executive Ted Pappas. Before GRAX he founded Ionia Corporation, which LogMeIn acquired in 2014 and turned into the foundation of its Xively IoT platform.

Career Highlights

• Founded GRAX in 2018 and led it as chief executive until the Ascendx merger, growing it into what has been described as one of the fastest-growing applications in Salesforce’s history.
• Appeared on the Dreamforce main stage and received the Salesforce Innovation Award.
• Led GRAX through its merger with CapStorm under Ascendx, announced and completed on 30 October 2025, and became chief product officer for data and AI in the combined company.
• Founded Ionia Corporation in 2004, built it into a Salesforce and Heroku Platinum Partner with more than 300 global customers, and sold it to LogMeIn in 2014.
• Ionia became the foundation of LogMeIn’s Xively IoT platform.
• Holds Salesforce certifications as Sales Cloud Consultant, Administrator, Consultant and Force.com Developer I.
• Contributes writing on enterprise data strategy to Dataversity.

Professional Journey

Gaska founded Ionia Corporation in 2004 and ran it as chief executive for a decade. What began as a small-business IoT product grew into an enterprise IoT platform serving more than 300 customers concentrated in healthcare and life sciences and in manufacturing, and the company became a Salesforce and Heroku Platinum Partner. LogMeIn acquired Ionia in 2014, and its technology became the basis of LogMeIn’s Xively IoT platform — an outcome that placed Gaska firmly inside the Salesforce ecosystem and gave him a close view of how enterprise data moves between platforms, and of who ends up controlling it.

He founded GRAX in 2018 to address the consequence of that. Salesforce holds an enormous amount of operational history for the companies that run on it, but the record of how that data changed over time is not straightforwardly the customer’s to keep, and conventional backup and archive products capture snapshots rather than the full sequence of change. GRAX was built to capture, preserve and make usable the complete history of a company’s Salesforce data inside the company’s own cloud infrastructure — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or on-premises. Gaska has described the founding belief plainly: that customers should own their data rather than rent access to it. The company grew quickly within the Salesforce ecosystem, earning a Salesforce Innovation Award and a Dreamforce main-stage slot.

In October 2025 GRAX and CapStorm, a self-hosted Salesforce data integration platform, merged under the Ascendx umbrella, with the acquisition completed and announced on 30 October. The combined company positions itself as a data and AI business built on the same premise — that Salesforce data belongs to the customer rather than the platform — and adds CapStorm’s six integrated applications to GRAX’s capabilities, aimed at governance, compliance and AI readiness across cloud and on-premises environments. Ted Pappas, CapStorm’s chief executive, leads the merged organisation.

Gaska moved from chief executive to chief product officer for data and AI, with responsibility for keeping product development focused on data ownership and on accelerating the return enterprises get from AI. He has argued publicly that consolidating CRM data into a customer’s own cloud infrastructure delivers materially faster analytics and substantially lower storage costs. GRAX has told existing customers that support and roadmap commitments continue unchanged through the transition.

Education

University of Maine at Farmington

Bachelor of Arts, Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. This is not confirmed by any primary or company source and should be treated as unverified.