Austin, TX, July 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Brevo, a leading customer engagement platform, today named Inken Kuhlmann-Rhinow as Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager, Self-Serve, the largest part of the company’s business. She joins the executive committee, reporting to founder and CEO Armand Thiberge, and is Brevo’s second executive hire since the company’s $500 million+ round in December 2025, which made it a unicorn.
Inken Kuhlmann-Rhinow and Armand Thiberge
Most companies still treat marketing as a function: marketing generates demand and then hands it off to someone else who owns the revenue. Brevo is changing that by giving Kuhlmann-Rhinow a much broader remit. As CMO she will shape how the brand is understood; as GM, Self-Serve she will hold the P&L for the product-led growth engine serving 600,000+ companies across 180 countries.
The appointment reflects a shift in where the most senior marketers sit in the org. For a decade the CMO role grew sideways, absorbing data, content, and customer experience without gaining authority over the business those things generate. The next move is up, into general management, and answers for the whole of a business rather than one of its inputs.
The logic is sharpest in AI-driven markets. As buyers discover, trial, and adopt software on their own, long before they ever speak to a salesperson, the brand and the product experience become one and the same. With this move, Brevo asserts that the person who shapes perception and the person who owns the result can no longer be two people.
Kuhlmann-Rhinow fits the profile precisely. She spent ten years at HubSpot, building its German-language market from the ground up. She then led their EMEA marketing segment as Senior Marketing Director through the company’s run from venture-backed startup to publicly listed category leader; an environment where product-led growth was the entire operating model. Most recently, she was the Global Chief Marketing Officer at Hays, leading the recruitment group’s marketing transformation. She has repeatedly been handed the parts of the business where brand and product meet, and asked to own the outcome.
“I’ve spent my career at the intersection of product-led growth and international brand-building, and Brevo is a rare company that has mastered both,” said Kuhlmann-Rhinow. “AI is rewriting how companies all over the world engage with their customers. My job is to make sure Brevo is the platform they do it on.”
Her appointment reflects Brevo’s conviction that the future of customer engagement puts full marketing power in everyone’s hands: powerful enough to handle multi-channel campaigns in one platform, allowing marketers to operate autonomously, and with value-led pricing that doesn’t punish customers for growing their business.
“We didn’t split this into a CMO job and a GM job, because in the AI era they aren’t two jobs,” adds Channing Ferrer, Americas CEO of Brevo. “Your product is your marketing and your marketing is your product. Inken has run both at scale, and her read on how AI changes the way businesses buy software will be decisive as we drive toward $1B+ in revenue by 2030.”
About Brevo: Brevo offers the most intuitive Customer Platform for the sustainable growth of all businesses and organizations (including nonprofits). With Brevo, companies benefit from a unified view of the customer journey through an all-in-one marketing and sales platform featuring email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat campaigns, and much more. Today, more than 600,000 companies including eBay, H&M, Louis Vuitton, Carrefour, and Michelin trust Brevo’s reliability to deepen their customer relationships. A B Corp–certified and Next40 company, Brevo employs over 1000 people worldwide. Its headquarters are located in Paris, France. For more information: www.brevo.com
Inken Kuhlmann-Rhinow
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