Wednesday 20 May 2026 8:01 am | Updated: Wednesday 20 May 2026 8:02 am

Usercentrics Appoints Pawan Hegde as COO and Promotes Elena Ignatova to CPTO

Usercentrics, a leading data privacy technology company, today announced the appointment of Pawan Hegde as Chief Operating Officer and the promotion of Elena Ignatova to Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO). Both appointments accelerate the company’s U.S. expansion and mark a new phase of growth as Usercentrics scales its platform to meet the demands of the AI era.

More than twenty U.S. states now have comprehensive privacy laws in effect, enforcement actions are mounting, and major advertising platforms are tightening their own consent standards in ways that directly affect business performance. At the same time, AI is creating an entirely new category of data risk — one that existing infrastructure was never designed to handle. Usercentrics is building the consent and compliance infrastructure that meets both moments: the regulatory pressure reshaping how businesses collect and activate data today, and the agentic AI transformation redefining how they’ll operate tomorrow.

“Every company adopting AI is processing data through systems that nobody actually controls. The chatbot wasn’t built with consent in mind, it uses everything. The gap isn’t just that rules aren’t being enforced, it’s that the right consent isn’t being collected in the first place and the compliance layer doesn’t exist yet. That’s what we’re building,” said Donna Dror, CEO of Usercentrics.

Hegde joins as COO, based in New York, bringing a rare combination of operational depth, financial rigor, and hands-on AI expertise. He has served as COO at Fluree, a generative AI and agentic data SaaS company; co-founded and scaled ZettaLabs from zero to acquisition in three years; and spent nearly eleven years at Thomson Reuters, overseeing $100M+ P&L responsibilities and more than $2 billion in M&A transactions. As COO, he will lead Business Intelligence, Corporate Development, Operations, and Finance.

“Usercentrics is at an inflection point, the market need is real, the product is proven, and the U.S. opportunity is significant. I’m joining because I believe compliance infrastructure is becoming a core part of how businesses operate, and I want to help build that,” said Pawan Hegde, COO, Usercentrics.

Ignatova brings over a decade of engineering and product leadership to the CPTO role, having most recently served as CTO at Taxdoo, where she led Engineering, Product, Design, and Research. Prior to that she held senior engineering leadership roles at Collibra, a data intelligence company. Bringing Product and Engineering under unified leadership at Usercentrics is designed to accelerate delivery cycles and create a single point of accountability across the company’s product and technical roadmap.

“The opportunity here is to build something that genuinely matters, infrastructure that doesn’t just govern how AI accesses data, but gives businesses the confidence to go further with it. The organizations that will lead in the AI era are the ones deploying agents in a way that’s controlled, auditable, and built to scale. Unifying Product and Engineering is how we help them get there faster,” said Elena Ignatova, CPTO, Usercentrics.

Usercentrics’ recent acquisition of MCP Manager, now available, reflects that belief in action. Built on the Model Context Protocol standard, MCP Manager gives AI agents structured, governed access to business systems, data, and capabilities, the connectivity layer that makes deeper agentic AI possible.

About Usercentrics

Usercentrics is a leading data privacy technology company that helps businesses collect, manage, and activate consented data with confidence. Trusted by 2.4 million websites and apps across 195 countries, the company processes more than 8.8 billion user consents every month. Through its platform — spanning consent management, server-side tagging, and AI data governance — Usercentrics gives businesses the compliance infrastructure to grow, innovate, and operate responsibly in an AI-first world. Learn more at usercentrics.com.