States Title Adds to Board of Directors

September 24, 2019

States Title announced that Karen Richardson has joined the company’s board of directors.

During her 30-year career in the technology and software industry, Richardson has held senior operating roles in the public and private technology sector. Beginning her career with a series of sales and marketing roles at Lotus Development Corporation, 3Com and cc:Mail. Richardson then moved to the role of vice president of sales for Netscape Communications Corp., which took its’ pioneering browser to market and opened the world wide web for business. From 1998 to 2005, Richardson’s executive leadership at publicly-traded enterprise software company E.piphany, including as CEO from 2003 to 2006, changed the way companies manage and sell to their customers.

“Karen’s experience with disrupting traditional industries by applying modern-day machine intelligence, combined with her knowledge of big company governance, will provide the operational excellence needed to continue to scale the States Title business,” said Max Simkoff, States Title CEO. “Her valuable perspective and expertise will help us continue to leverage our transformative title and escrow solution to dramatically reduce the time and complexity involved in closing residential real estate transactions across the US,”

Earlier this year, States Title acquired North American Title Insurance Company (NATIC), which held certificates of authority to operate in 39 states. Prior to the deal, States Title was licensed in California and Airzona.

Richardson has been on the board of both early-stage AI and machine learning startups (Ayasdi, Virtuoz) as well as larger global platform leaders (BT Group Plc. and Exponent). Richardson also served on the board of Worldpay from 2016 (including on the Audit and Risk committees) until their acquisition by FIS earlier this year in a transaction valued at $43 Billion. Richardson is a former advisor to Silver Lake Partners, a private equity investment firm that is the global leader in technology investing.

"Over the past 20 years, I've seen modern-day predictive analytics and machine learning transform entire industries,” Richardson said. “Title and escrow is a traditional business that is now ripe for the same kind of transformation—and States Title is clearly best positioned to lead this change.”


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