Strategic transition enhances operational capabilities as Hurst brings decades of technology experience to lead Balena’s next phase of growth.

Balena (the “Company”), the leading platform for edge device management backed by growth equity firm LoneTree Capital (“LoneTree”), today announced the appointment of Leon Hurst as Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”), effective immediately. Mr. Hurst joins Balena following the Company’s record-breaking H1 2026, and succeeds the three former co-CEOs who will transition to new leadership roles that position the Company to deepen its platform and widen its reach.

Mr. Hurst joins with more than two decades of international leadership experience across technology, SaaS and mobility, including senior positions at Flock, IMS (Trak Global Group), JATO Dynamics, Nokia and Jaguar Land Rover. At Balena, he will focus on expanding enterprise adoption while continuing to invest in the reliability, security and developer experience that have been central to the platform, building on a footprint of 600 global customers and more than 850,000 devices under management.

“The team at Balena has built a remarkable foundation rooted in developer trust and deep product credibility,” said Mr. Hurst. "As Robotics and Physical AI shift intelligence from data centers into the physical world, managing edge systems at scale introduces an entirely new level of complexity. Balena has spent years removing that complexity for developers. My priority as CEO is to expand our enterprise capabilities and accelerate our Edge AI roadmap, helping organizations across industries move from prototype to large-scale deployment with the least friction and maximal speed while preserving the developer-first approach, reliability and security that have always been central to Balena.”

Balena’s full-stack IoT and edge management platform brings modern cloud containerization and DevOps practices to physical hardware, simplifying how engineering teams build, deploy and manage connected-device fleets. By decoupling applications from the underlying operating system, Balena enables developers to push containerized updates to physical devices, manage fleets remotely and orchestrate workloads across more than 100 hardware types from a unified platform. The platform is hardware- and industry-agnostic, with proven deployments across core sectors, including energy and EV infrastructure, industrial automation, healthcare, agriculture and robotics.

As part of the strategic leadership transition, Balena’s three former co-CEOs will remain with the Company in executive roles: Chris Crocker-White as Chief Experience Officer, focused on user and developer experience; Phil Wilson as Chief Strategy Officer, aligning engineering, the product roadmap and commercial growth; and Konstantinos Mouzakis as Chief Transformation Officer, leading brand positioning and organizational design.

“Balena’s focus is to continue lowering the barrier to entry and improving the experience when deploying technology into the physical world,” said Mr. Crocker-White. “This next chapter gives us the opportunity to pursue the mission with refreshed conviction and get our product into the hands of those that will benefit most.”

“Balena has built a differentiated platform that addresses a fundamental challenge in this market: making it easier for organizations to deploy, secure and manage large fleets of devices without unnecessary complexity,” said Peter Bozian, Principal at LoneTree Capital. “We see significant room for Balena to expand its footprint across industries and larger enterprises, and we are excited to support Leon and the broader team as they execute on that opportunity.”

About Balena

Balena is a global IoT and Edge AI platform that gives developers and organizations a reliable way to build, deploy and manage fleets of connected devices at scale. Using a secure, container-based architecture, Balena enables customers to provision devices, push over-the-air updates, monitor performance and troubleshoot remotely from a single interface. Balena’s ecosystem supports a wide range of hardware and use cases, allowing teams to focus on their products and businesses rather than infrastructure complexity. For more information, please visit www.balena.io.

About LoneTree Capital

LoneTree is a growth-focused private capital firm. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York City, LoneTree provides operational and M&A support alongside flexible capital to accelerate revenue growth, enabling its partner companies to pursue their next stage of growth with greater speed and certainty. The firm makes both minority and control investments of $10 million to $50 million across technology and related business services companies. For more information, please visit www.lonetreecap.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260915853816/en/

press@balena.io

Jeremy Milner
Gregory
jmilner@gregoryagency.com

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