Digital Twin Platform Neara Taps Former Adobe VP As Chief Product Officer

Australian digital twin company, Neara, has appointed former Adobe executive, Ian Wang, as its new Chief Product Officer as it looks to expand its AI capabilities and push into critical infrastructure sectors beyond energy.

Wang joins the Sydney-based company after nearly two decades in technology product leadership roles. Most recently, he served as Vice President and Head of Product at Adobe in the United States, where he led the global product team for Adobe Express across core product, growth and agentic AI.

During his time at Adobe, Express became a driver for the company’s expanding reach of over a billion monthly active users, including in 99 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. Wang was also a product leader for Adobe’s AI efforts, responsible for platform teams behind the company’s AI product roadmap across Express, Firefly and GenStudio.

The appointment follows Neara’s $90 million Series D funding round earlier this year, which valued the company at unicorn status.

Co-Founder Shifts To Strategy Role

Wang takes over the Chief Product Officer role from company Co-Founder, Karamvir Singh, who has moved into the Chief Strategy Officer position to focus on integration and go-to-market expansion opportunities.

In his new role, Wang will bring product management, engineering and design functions together under a single leadership structure. His focus will be on accelerating Neara’s AI-native product pipeline and extending the platform’s engineering-grade modelling capabilities to critical infrastructure operators beyond the energy sector.

Neara builds physics-enabled software that utilities use to model power grid behaviour and predict structural risks such as severe weather, vegetation encroachment and line overload. The company’s platform creates digital twins enriched with spatial and engineering-grade data, drawing connections between assets and physical behaviour to support decision-making in highly regulated environments.

Long-Standing Connection To The Company

Neara Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Danilatos, described Wang as a long-time collaborator who has maintained ties with the company over the past decade.

“Ian is no stranger to Neara. An early collaborator who’s remained connected to the company, our team and our ambitions over the last decade,” Danilatos commented.

“In that time, Neara has established its position as the leading energy infrastructure physics platform powering global utilities’ decisions, but our ambition doesn’t end here. We’ve more than doubled our headcount in the last twelve months, and as we continue to grow and scale for broader critical infrastructure, Ian brings exactly the expertise and experience needed to execute our product roadmap.”

Expanding Beyond Energy

Wang pointed to the complexity of the infrastructure sector as a key draw for joining the company.

“It’s an exciting time to join Neara, a homegrown technology and innovation leader operating at the forefront of one of the world’s most complex industries,” Wang remarked.

“Infrastructure owners and operators need solutions that can bring together the domain depth, network-wide scale and intelligence that enable holistic insights to make better, more confident decisions. I could not be more excited to be a part of advancing Neara’s product vision and portfolio to fundamentally change the role of digital twins in infrastructure.”

Neara’s AI product pipeline is central to its strategy for differentiation. The company argues that the spatial and engineering-grade context embedded in its platform gives it the depth required to operate in ecosystems that demand domain expertise, a foundation it plans to build on as it moves into infrastructure sectors beyond energy.

The company has more than doubled its headcount over the past 12 months as it scales operations to support that expansion.

Last Updated on September 29, 2026 by Nick Ross