Kodiak has appointed Mohamed ‘Mo’ Elshenawy, former president and CTO of self-driving car company Cruise (acquired by General Motors), to Kodiak’s board of directors. Elshenawy is a noted technology executive and board advisor with more than two decades of experience leading large-scale AI, product and engineering organizations across autonomous mobility, e-commerce, cloud infrastructure and healthcare sectors.
Elshenawy’s executive leadership experience, specifically in pioneering autonomous vehicle solutions, further strengthens Kodiak’s board as it prepares to become a publicly listed company via a business combination with Ares Acquisition Corporation II.
While at Cruise, Elshenawy led the transformation of the company’s autonomous vehicle programs, launching and scaling the first commercial driverless rideshare service in San Francisco, and expanding operations to multiple US cities.
“Mo guided Cruise through critical phases of technology and operational development, and helped manage Cruise’s integration into a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors,” said Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak. “His expertise in technology platform transformation, expanding world-class engineering organizations, and deploying AI into real-world operations will be invaluable as we scale our product deployment.”
Elshenawy currently serves as the CTO at Hims & Hers Health, Inc., where he is working to accelerate the company’s vision to build the next-generation healthcare platform, powered by AI and designed to deliver deeply personalized, accessible care at scale. Earlier in his career, Elshenawy held technology leadership roles at Amazon, where he led global engineering for the company’s ReCommerce business and spearheaded a retail big data analytics platform.
“Kodiak has a deep history of the kind of focused, pragmatic innovation that’s needed to bring autonomous trucking to scale,” said Elshenawy. “I’m excited to support such an innovative company as they advance a category-defining platform built on safety, performance and real-world impact.”
Elshenawy, who holds more than 10 patents across AI, robotics and autonomous vehicles, currently sits on the software advisory board at Mercedes-Benz and serves as an independent board director at Wasoko-MaxAB, an African B2B e-commerce business. He also has served as CTO and founding partner of multiple successful startups, with a focus on cloud-native fintech and AI solutions.
Kodiak is continuing to strengthen its board expertise as it scales its autonomous trucking platform. In May, Kodiak announced that both Ken Goldman and Kristin Sverchek joined its board. Goldman, a seasoned financial executive with over four decades of leadership experience in public and private companies, most recently served as president of Hillspire, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s integrated family office. Sverchek was an early employee at rideshare platform company Lyft and held multiple leadership roles at the company, including president of business affairs, before being named president of Lyft in 2023.
In April, Kodiak announced a definitive business combination agreement with AACT. The proposed business combination is expected to close in the second half of 2025, subject to approval by AACT and Kodiak stockholders and the satisfaction or waiver of customary closing conditions. Upon the closing of the proposed business combination, the combined company will be named Kodiak AI, Inc., and its common stock and public warrants are expected to be listed on a national stock exchange and trade under the ticker symbols KDK and KDK WS, respectively, subject to approval by the relevant exchange.