Brilliant Harvest Adds AI Engineering Leader Ivan Despot to Advance Agentic Support & Sales for Heavy Equipment Dealerships
Calgary, AB — April 20, 2026 — Brilliant Harvest, the AI customer experience platform built for the heavy equipment industry, announces the appointment of Ivan Despot as VP of AI Engineering to lead its AI and engineering teams. Despot joins at a pivotal moment in the company’s growth, bringing deep agentic AI expertise combined with a history of establishing systems to manage the most prioritary data, and a demonstrated ability to move quickly from architecture to execution. His arrival further strengthens a team that is rapidly expanding its footprint across the dealership market with over 3,000 dealer employees powered by Brilliant Harvest.
Despot joins Brilliant Harvest from Collabware, where he served as Director of Engineering. Collabware specializes in intelligent information archiving, cross-platform discovery, and the secure ingestion of large volumes of sensitive documents for enterprise and national security organizations operating under the strictest regulatory requirements. In that role, Despot led engineering initiatives focused on agentic AI that utilized confidential content, including records, contracts and proprietary documentation.
“Ivan brings exactly the technical experience we need to enable further workflow automation to our dealers and their customers at scale,” said Remi Schmaltz, CEO & Founder of Brilliant Harvest. “The work of ensuring our AI agents operate accurately, fast and in a way that dealers can trust, is mission critical, and Ivan has done it at a high level for some of the most compliance-sensitive organizations in the world. Beyond his expertise, Ivan moves fast. In an environment where dealer uptime and team efficiency are non-negotiable, that pace matters enormously. We’re honored to have him on the team.”
Despot shared his perspective on joining the company: “Equipment dealerships carry an incredible amount of specialized knowledge, accumulated over years of service work, fleet experience and technician expertise. Most of it is still buried in documents, conversational data and systems that teams can’t easily access in the moment they need it most. Brilliant Harvest is solving that problem in a way that is practical, trusted and built for how dealers actually work.”
The addition of Despot reflects Brilliant Harvest’s continued investment in growth, following a $4M USD seed financing round announced in February 2026. The platform now supports dealerships representing over 50% of CNH Industrial’s large dealer stores, signaling growing trust in AI-driven knowledge as a core layer of dealership operations. This market penetration is anchored by multiyear renewals with Rocky Mountain Equipment (RME) and Titan Machinery, validating the platform’s ability to deliver measurable operational efficiency at scale.