Full-service data collection firm Rep Data has announced two new key hires to their team: Karen Gardner (pictured at left) joins as Chief Financial Officer and Riley Croft (at right) as Vice President of Sales.

Founded three years ago, Rep Data has developed proprietary tools that address many of the shortcomings in delivering online sample and recently acquired Research Defender, a provider of sample fraud protection services.  

Gardner, based in New York, was most recently the CFO at business education startup Section, which recently raised $30 million. Prior to Section, she was previously the CFO at Pollfish, which was purchased by Prodege in February of 2022, and VP of Finance at L2, a business intelligence platform that was later acquired by Gartner.

Croft, based in Rep Data’s New Orleans headquarters, joins with more than 15 years in sales ranging from direct marketing to enterprise SaaS. Within marketing research, he had previously launched the partner sales function at Lucid that grew the Marketplace supply chain worldwide and secured the majority of platform revenue to and through Lucid’s sale to Cint. He will focus on Rep Data’s suite of software products.

Patrick Stokes, Rep Data’s Founder & CEO comments, “As our acquisition of Research Defender proved last month, our commitment to data quality is of the utmost importance to our team. These two highly experienced professionals, Karen and Riley, add tremendous value to our core mission of improving the sample ecosystem within the marketing research industry.”