Barbary Brunner, CMO of Phunware

The CEO of the Austin Technology Council Barbary Brunner announced Thursday that she has left the organization to join Phunware, which also announced it’s launching a cryptocurrency called Phuncoin.

Brunner will join Phunware as its Chief Marketing Officer.

Brunner, with 25 years of technology leadership experience, previously served as CMO of Experian’s PriceGrabber business, CMO for Yahoo! Media, Chief Digital Products Officer for MediaNews Group, director of global planning for Microsoft’s MSN business and executive producer for SierraOnline.

Brunner will focus on supporting Phunware as it plans to go public, launches a crptonetworking ecosystem and prepares for its next stage of growth. Brunner reports to Alan S. Knitowski, Phunware’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer.

Other recent hires at Phunware include COO Randall Crowder, GM Audience Building and Monetization Ian Karnell, EVP Product Management and Engineering Matthew Lindenberger, and EVP Corporate Development Tushar Patel. And CFO Matt Aune and CTO and Co-Founder Luan Dong, make up Phunware’s leadership team.

“With our announced intent to merge with NASDAQ company Stellar Acquisition III, Inc, and upcoming launch of Phuncoin, we are at a pivotal moment in Phunware’s history and in the larger landscapes of mobile application software, media and data,” Knitowski said in a news release. “Taking advantage of this moment requires a marketing leader with vision and expertise. Barbary possesses these and more, and we are thrilled to welcome her to Phunware’s leadership team.”

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to join this terrific team of leaders. I can’t think of a more perfect mutual fit than Phunware’s platform, tools and data that touch and improve the lives of more than 1 Billion people globally every month. The breadth and depth of engagement opportunities that Phunware makes available to brands is unprecedented,” Brunner said in a news release. “And I’m also so very pleased to be joining a company that, at 50 percent diversity in its employee population and with a diverse leadership team, understands that how important this is to drive product excellence, customer satisfaction and revenue results.”

Phunware is a software company that focuses on helping brands engage their customers on mobile devices. In February, Phunware announced its intent to go public through a merger with Stellar Acquisition and to launch a cryptonetworking ecosystem.