Rich LaBarca

Chief Technology Officer at LabConnect

New York City Metropolitan Area, United States

About Rich LaBarca

Rich LaBarca is Chief Technology Officer at LabConnect. Location: New York City Metropolitan Area, United States.

I'm an enterprise technology executive with a startup brain. Having scaled products in large corporate environments and contributed to the executive teams that launched and exited multiple startups, I bring elements of both worlds to every role. I’ve raised institutional funding, completed successful M&As, created original, patented IP, and scaled revenue through product, technology, and business development. Currently, I serve as the Chief Technology Officer at LabConnect, transforming global clinical trial execution with AI. I spent the first decade of my career in healthcare—building technology and products for computer-assisted surgery, which spun off a startup that exited successfully to Smith & Nephew. Now at LabConnect, we are orchestrating the complex logistics, data management, and specialized testing required to run global clinical trials, using ML and AI to improve success rates and bring life-changing therapies to reality. Most recently, as Chief Product & Technology Officer at TrustEngine, I led the transformation of our Mortgage Coach product into a fully agentic loan recommendation and coaching engine backed by a sophisticated borrower data pipeline. Alongside evolving the product, I guided our team's transition into agentic product development and engineering. This work directly inspired my ongoing development of Purlin, an open-source framework moving the industry forward into deterministic agentic engineering by constraining AI outcomes using rules and proofs (https://github.com/rlabarca/purlin/blob/main/docs/index.md). My enterprise experience includes serving as Partner GM of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights CDP, where I led a 250-person product and engineering organization, scaled the P&L to 50% YoY growth, and established a privacy-first strategy. Prior to Microsoft, I was VP of Oracle's Consumer Identity product and Audience Data platform, bringing the latter to profitability. Preceding Oracle, I built AddThis' audience data business from zero through a highly profitable acquisition by Oracle. Continually active in the SaaS and data startup scenes, I co-founded and sold a mobile adtech startup, served as a Board Member for Building Optics LLC, and acted as a Strategic Advisor for Virtru. Specialties: scaling businesses and product development processes, SaaS, B2B, product strategy, technology leadership, agentic engineering, deterministic AI, customer data, healthtech, data privacy, patents, startups, M&A.

Skills

  • Agentic AI Development
  • Data
  • Start-ups

Additional experience

  • Chief Product & Technology Officer

    TrustEngine

    August 2022 – May 2026

Education

  • BS, Carnegie Mellon University
  • MS, Carnegie Mellon University