News upstart Axios hired its first CRO with an eye toward overseas expansion and paid products

Axios

Fabricio Drumond, CRO, Axios.

• Buzzy startup Axios has hired its first CRO as it eyes international expansion and a paid product.
• Fabricio Drumond is a media outsider but brings international and B2B experience that hints at Axios' plans.
• His hire comes as Axios has been gearing up to launch a paid product that it plans to sell to big companies.
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Buzzy startup Axios has hired its first CRO as it eyes international expansion and a paid product.

Fabricio Drumond is a media outsider but brings international and B2B experience that hints at Axios' plans. Most recently, he was EVP and COO at SuperBAC, a Brazilian-based global biotechnology solutions company. He's also worked at private equity-backed companies including Ecopolo and Nova Opersan, which provide water and wastewater solutions to industrial and commercial clients.

Axios, best known for delivering scoops and tightly written news for professionals, has been gearing up to launch a paid product that it plans to sell to big companies to offset its reliance on advertising. Axios' plan is also to eventually expand its editorial product outside the US.

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei said Drumond's mandate is to continue to expand Axios' majority ad-based business in the near term and longer term, take its speed-read formula, which it calls "smart brevity," international.

Drumond is also expected to be involved in the planned paid product, internally called Axios Plus and aimed at companies' marketing departments as a way to help them communicate with employees. It's been hiring key staff to develop the product and testing it.

"We wanted someone who's highly ambitious, who thinks differently from the traditional media space, who's scaled companies, who has some expertise we don't have," VandeHei said of Drumond. "He's someone who's done all the things you want to do when you want to become a bigger company."

Non-media hires like Drumond are becoming increasingly common at media companies as they branch out to other business lines like subscriptions and e-commerce and work to make their products more reader-friendly.

Drumond, whose appointment was announced today, is scheduled to start November 29 and report to Axios cofounder and president Roy Schwartz. Reporting to him will be Abby Clawson, VP of Finance & Accounting; Jimmy Shelton, director of video; and Jon Otto, VP of client partnerships.

While biotech may appear to have little in common with an ad-driven media company, Drumond said the common thread is using tech to disrupt an industry.

"In biotech, we were using clean and sustainable technology on microbes," he said. "We did a lot in agriculture. Smart brevity allows us to disrupt the communications industry."

Axios was founded in 2017 and has raised $30 million as of November 2017 from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, NBC News, and others. Among other key hires of late, it just named Sara Kehaulani Goo as executive editor, a new position, to help it with audience and audio expansion and plans to grow its tech, business, and science coverage.