Maria Zhang - CEO Palona AI (Ex-Google VP, Tinder CTO) - Retail AI

Maria Zhang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Palona AI, a startup building emotionally intelligent AI agents to help consumer brands scale personalized customer experiences. She previously served as VP of Engineering at Google and Instagram, and led applied AI initiatives at Meta. Earlier in her career, she was CTO of Tinder, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn, and VP at Yahoo following the acquisition of her startup, Alike. With experience leading teams of over 1,000 engineers and building products used by hundreds of millions globally, Maria brings deep expertise in AI, product engineering, and team building. She also served as a Venture Partner at IDG Capital and was named one of the “Top 100 Women in Tech to Watch.”Topics:

• Building emotionally intelligent AI agents for modern brands

• Lessons from scaling engineering teams and consumer products

• Applying practical AI to solve real customer experience problems

#AI #RetailTech #CustomerExperience #SaaS #WomenInTech #StartupLeadership #EngineeringManagement #VentureCapital