Dennis Khvostionov

CTO / CPO · Co-Founder · Investor · San Francisco Bay Area

Dennis Khvostionov

A senior technology executive for more than two decades: companies founded, worldwide organizations built, an exit to a public company, and one constant product thesis — turn disparate data into products people can reason with.

LinkedInPremier Eighty One
24+
Years as a technology executive
2016
DGLogik acquired by Acuity Brands (NYSE: AYI)
100+
Person organization led at Acuity Brands
6
Companies in the current portfolio
1,000+
Global DGLux platform deployments
2×
Mobile map engagement after realtor.com FlyAround
01

About

The job of a technology executive is to make the architecture, the product and the organization answer to a single strategy.

Dennis Khvostionov is a senior technology executive. He has spent more than two decades as a chief technology officer and chief product officer — as an operator inside Cisco and Acuity Brands, as a co-founder across the Premier Eighty One portfolio, and as the managing partner of the firm behind it. The mandate has never changed: own the technology, the product and the organization, and make them answer to a single strategy.

The record runs through every stage of company building. At Integrated Building Solutions he served as CTO for nearly a decade, leading enterprise engagements with Adobe, HP, Roche and eBay. At Cisco he ran a forty-person design and development organization across multiple business groups and established the company’s Visualization Center of Excellence. At DGLogik he co-founded the company, architected its platform and led it to acquisition by Acuity Brands in 2016 — then stayed on as a vice president of the public company, leading an organization of more than a hundred people and integrating his platform and team into a business spanning a million sensors and more than a billion square feet of connected buildings.

Today he leads technology and product across the portfolio: TopHap, whose engine is licensed by realtor.com; Smart Spatial, deployed with Schneider Electric, HPE and Micron; and Data Monsters, an NVIDIA Elite partner serving Fortune 500 clients. His leadership style is consistent — operate as CTO and CPO in one, adopt platforms early and commit, and build worldwide engineering teams where engineers own systems end to end.

02

Principles

Five theses on how he leads. They recur across every venture — in the organization, in the architecture, and in the product.

  1. 01

    Organizations are architectures.

    The discipline that structures a system also structures a team: clear interfaces, distributed ownership, no single point of failure. He has run a 40-person design and development organization inside Cisco, a 100-plus person organization inside Acuity Brands, and worldwide distributed teams at DGLogik, TopHap and Smart Spatial. Engineers own systems end to end, and the architecture and the product report to the same person.

  2. 02

    Small teams, serious tooling.

    A small team with the right platform outperforms a large team with the wrong one. Adoption decisions are therefore leadership decisions: Dart at version 0.8, because it doubled the effective size of the DGLogik team; AI-assisted engineering across the current portfolio, for the same reason. The tooling is part of the organization chart.

  3. 03

    Platforms outlive products.

    Every venture is built as a platform whose capabilities outlast their first application. DSA, the open-source architecture underneath DGLux, became Atrius Solution Builder inside Acuity Brands and runs to this day. TopHap’s data engine was built for one product and now powers realtor.com’s map experience. Smart Spatial builds one spatial foundation and reuses it across sales, simulation, operations and training. The product is the proof; the platform is the asset.

  4. 04

    If people can see it, they can act on it.

    The interface of choice has never changed: the picture. Dashboards at DGLogik, the parcel map at TopHap, the neighborhood heatmap at Malobo, the digital twin at Smart Spatial. Visualization is not presentation. It is how non-specialists reason about complex systems, and it is the difference between data that is stored and data that is used.

  5. 05

    Measurement must end in action.

    Analytics that stops at reporting is inventory, not intelligence. vTilt is built on this premise and defines its category as conversion intelligence: it identifies which sources bring buyers rather than clicks, reads every session, answers visitor questions in context and follows up with each person about what they came for. Measure, think, act — one loop, one system. Tools that only say what happened are half-finished; the system should explain why, then do something about it.

03

Experience

Several of these tracks ran in parallel. From 2007 to 2011 he held senior roles at Cisco while building DGLogik, the customer and the company at once.

  1. 2002 — 2011

    Integrated Building Solutions

    Chief Technology Officer

    Master systems integration for commercial facilities: unifying the disparate protocols, controllers and equipment of smart buildings into a single operational platform. Lead architect and head of R&D; technical lead on engagements with Adobe, HP, Roche and eBay. This was IoT before the industry had a name for it.

  2. 2007 — 2011

    Cisco Systems

    Senior Manager, User-Centered Design

    Owned UI/UX strategy and standards across multiple business groups and led a 40-plus person rich-internet-application design and development organization. Established Cisco’s Visualization Center of Excellence.

    Adobe MAX Awards finalist · Visualization Center of Excellence

  3. 2007 — 2016

    DGLogik

    Co-Founder & CTO

    Architected DGLux — a drag-and-drop environment for building and visualizing IoT applications without code — and DSA, an open-source distributed services architecture connecting devices, services and applications at every layer of the infrastructure. DGLux powered Cisco Live’s real-time visualizations and more than 1,000 deployments worldwide, on 200,000+ lines of production Dart shipped before the language reached 1.0.

    Acquired by Acuity Brands, June 2016 · Multi-year ControlTrends Award winner · Google Dart Developer Summit speaker, 2015

  4. 2016 — 2018

    Acuity Brands

    Vice President, Software Platforms & Architecture

    Joined the public company through the acquisition as Vice President of IoE, then led software platform strategy and architecture at the head of an organization of more than a hundred people. DGLux became Atrius Solution Builder, the development environment of a platform spanning a million sensors and more than a billion square feet of connected buildings.

  5. 2018 — Present

    TopHap

    Co-Founder & CTO

    A real estate intelligence platform built on 47 trillion records spanning 150 million US parcels. TopHap technology is licensed by realtor.com, where it powers Dynamic Map Layers — H3-based choropleths aggregated from millions of records, resolving from ZIP level to a single parcel as the map zooms — and FlyAround, an immersive 3D view built with Google Maps Platform.

    Licensed by realtor.com · Built with Google Maps Platform · Mapbox showcase

  6. Present

    Smart Spatial, Data Monsters, Premier Eighty One

    Co-Founder & CTO · CTO · Managing Partner

    Smart Spatial turns complex infrastructure into operational digital twins, built on NVIDIA Omniverse and OpenUSD and deployed with Schneider Electric, HPE and Micron. Data Monsters delivers enterprise AI to Fortune 500 clients as an NVIDIA Elite partner. Premier Eighty One is the investment firm behind the portfolio, which also includes Malobo and vTilt.

04

Companies

TopHap

Co-Founder & CTO

Real estate intelligence: geospatial visualization and analysis across 47 trillion records and 150 million US parcels. Licensed by realtor.com to power its map-based property-data visualization.

Smart Spatial

Co-Founder & CTO

An operational digital twin platform that turns complex infrastructure into interactive 3D environments — one spatial foundation reused across go-to-market, simulation, operations and training.

Data Monsters

CTO

Enterprise AI engineering as an NVIDIA Elite and AMD partner: 150-plus projects including Fortune 500 clients, delivered by an 80-person team of engineers and PhDs. Generative-AI workers, real-time conversational avatars and media intelligence, in production.

Malobo

Co-Founder

The geospatial discipline applied to travel: a map-first agency where neighborhood heatmaps, travel-time search, natural-language queries and live prices from 200-plus booking sites resolve on one screen. Book where you actually pictured yourself.

vTilt

Co-Founder

Conversion intelligence: one script, ten modules, one loop — measure, think, act. It identifies which sources bring buyers, reads every session for hesitation, answers visitor questions from full knowledge of the site and the journey, and follows up with each person about what they came for.

Premier Eighty One

Managing Partner

The investment vehicle behind the portfolio. The philosophy is stated plainly: combine technology with traditional industries, prioritize fundamentals, and hold a global perspective.

DGLogik

Co-Founder & CTO · Exited — acquired by Acuity Brands, 2016

IoT data visualization and application development: DGLux and the open-source DSA platform. The technology lives on as Atrius Solution Builder inside Acuity Brands’ IoT platform.

05

Recognition

The record is carried by the organizations that published it: Google, Epic Games, Mapbox, Acuity Brands, realtor.com and the trade press.

“Without Dart’s productivity benefits and tooling, we’d need a team twice our size.”
Dennis Khvostionov, CTO of DGLogik · Google’s official Dart blog, 2015
“When it comes to user experience, nothing else compares to Mapbox. I don’t think there is any other choice today.”
Dennis Khvostionov, CTO of TopHap · Mapbox customer showcase
“We can bring 3D to life in ways that were simply not possible just a few years ago.”
Dennis Khvostionov, CTO of Smart Spatial · ASCE Infrastructure Report Card, 2025
“We believe DGLogik’s expertise in the development of technologies focused on advanced data aggregation, association, and visualization creates an exciting opportunity to accelerate the expansion of Acuity Brands’ portfolio of holistic IoT solutions.”
Vernon J. Nagel, Chairman & CEO, Acuity Brands · Acquisition announcement, July 2016

Selected coverage and talks

06

Expertise

Core skills

Data visualization and data science: turning raw, disparate data into products people can reason with. It is the constant across every venture.

Real-time visualization systems
DGLux dashboards, Cisco’s Visualization Center of Excellence, Cisco Live in real time.
Geospatial analytics
H3-based choropleths aggregated from millions of records; 47 trillion records fused into one queryable map.
Data science & valuation models
Machine-learning valuation engines and market assessment built on fused public and proprietary data.
Product & UX architecture
Design systems and user-centered standards at Cisco scale; drag-and-drop tools that make complex data operable.
Conversion intelligence
vTilt: attribution, session intelligence and AI follow-up closing the loop from measurement to action across the full funnel.
Applied AI in production
A ChatGPT plugin at TopHap by mid-2023; AI memory and agent interfaces at vTilt; enterprise generative-AI systems at Data Monsters.

Domains

The same craft, applied where the data is hardest: the physical world.

IoT & smart buildings
Integrated Building Solutions, DGLogik and Acuity Brands: from master systems integration to a platform spanning a billion square feet.
Geospatial & real estate intelligence
TopHap: 150 million parcels, licensed by realtor.com.
Digital twins & 3D simulation
Smart Spatial on NVIDIA Omniverse and OpenUSD; deployments with Schneider Electric, HPE and Micron.

Executive leadership

The organization is designed with the architecture and the product — never after them.

CTO and CPO in one
Owns both the technology stack and the product definition across every venture. The architecture and the product are designed together, or not at all.
M&A and integration
Led DGLogik from founding through acquisition by Acuity Brands, then served as a vice president of the public company, integrating platform and team.
Enterprise partnerships
realtor.com, Google, NVIDIA, Schneider Electric, HPE, Micron — licensing, co-development and deployment at Fortune 500 scale.
Early adoption as discipline
Flex at its peak. Dart at version 0.8, with 200,000 lines in production before 1.0. IoT before the name. A ChatGPT plugin in production by mid-2023.
Worldwide engineering teams
A 40-plus person organization at Cisco; 100-plus at Acuity Brands; distributed teams at DGLogik, TopHap and Smart Spatial, where engineers own systems end to end.