Welcoming Rena Ogura to Palona as Head of Business Operations & Strategy

Palona is entering a new chapter.

We recently closed our Series A to accelerate the development of our Physical AI operating layer for businesses, starting with restaurants. It is an exciting and critical moment. The next phase of Palona is not just about building breakthrough technology. It is about building the operating foundation for scale at speed.

That is why I’m excited to welcome Rena Ogura to Palona as Head of Business Operations & Strategy.

Rena brings a rare combination of strategic discipline, industry depth, founder experience, and execution speed. She has worked as a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting’s Strategy practice where she advised Food & Beverage sector C-suite leaders on enterprise growth, commercial strategy, and AI transformation. She has also been a founder herself, building and running a New York City marketplace that connected Michelin-star restaurant talent chefs, sommeliers, bartenders, and hospitality professionals, with corporate and B2B demand. After four years of building the company, she successfully exited the business last summer.

I first met Rena through Professor Michael Kaufman at Harvard Business School, who teaches a course on restaurant management and had advised Rena on her startup while she was a student. From our earliest conversations, I was struck by how quickly she could move between levels: from long-range company strategy to the very practical details of operational execution. That range is exactly what Palona needs right now.

We are building AI that takes on complex, high-value tasks for physical businesses where human-to-human interaction matters. Our long-term vision is a single AI platform that can listen, see, reason, take action, and help businesses focus even more on their customers than ever before. We are starting in restaurants because they are operationally complex and deeply human.

As we build toward our broader platform vision, we need leaders who can help us turn strategy into scalable execution. For Palona, that means sharpening our go-to-market motion, building a marketing engine that can create demand and tell our story clearly, strengthening business operations, and putting the right systems in place as we grow. Rena will play a critical role across that growth agenda.

When asked what drew her to Palona now, Rena shared:

“What drew me to Palona was the chance to work with world-class technologists on a problem that is both incredibly hard and deeply human.

The caliber of the team was obvious to me from the beginning. But what made Palona especially compelling was the way that technical ambition is paired with real respect for the customers we serve and the environments they operate in: places where human connection and hospitality are table stakes.

The timing also matters. AI is moving from tools and workflows that assist people with digital work to systems that can participate in the real world. Palona is at the forefront of bringing that shift into physical businesses, where context, trust, and judgment shape the customer experience.

That is the kind of frontier I want to help build."

Welcome to Palona, Rena. I’m excited to build this next chapter together.

Maria Zhang

Co-Founder & CEO, Palona AI