BEACHWOOD, Ohio — Hrizn, the Content Operating System for automotive dealership visibility, today announced the appointment of James Grace as Chief Technology Officer.
Grace brings a career that spans the full arc of automotive technology — from OEM innovation and connected vehicle systems to dealership marketing technology, analytics platforms, SaaS product development, and entrepreneurial software ventures. He joins Hrizn with a rare combination of engineering depth, product instincts, automotive fluency, and founder-level operating experience.
The appointment comes as Hrizn accelerates its position at the center of a fundamental shift in how dealerships earn visibility. Search is changing. Social distribution is changing. AI-generated answers are changing how customers discover and evaluate businesses. In that environment, content can no longer be treated as a campaign asset or a vendor checkbox. It has become infrastructure: structured, governed, distributed, measurable, and built to compound over time.
For Grace, the decision to join Hrizn was as much philosophical as professional.
“I’ve spent a long time building tools that helped dealerships run better marketing campaigns,” Grace said. “What I kept bumping into was the same upstream problem: the content foundation wasn’t there. You can’t optimize a system that isn’t built yet. Hrizn is building that system — and that’s a fundamentally different kind of company to be part of.”
Before Grace wrote a line of SaaS code, he spent the formative years of his career on the OEM side of the automotive industry, drawn not only to engineering, but to the product and experience problems that make vehicles meaningful to the people who drive them.
A defining early moment came through his work on a patent for bringing DVR functionality into the in-vehicle experience. The work captured something essential about how Grace approaches technology. He was not interested in what was technically possible in isolation. He was interested in what people would actually want, how they would use it, and why it would matter.
That instinct — the ability to connect engineering decisions to human experience — became a through-line across his career.
Grace later served as Director of Advanced Engineering at Panasonic Automotive Systems, where he led advanced technology development and contributed to multiple vehicle program launches. He also held leadership roles at General Motors and TeleNav, building a foundation across connected vehicle systems, infotainment architecture, product strategy, and automotive business development.
Years inside large automotive organizations sharpened his product instincts and eventually tested his appetite for institutional speed. Grace thought like an owner long before he formally became one.
Grace founded Wizely as a consulting practice helping dealer teams apply customer data and analytics to digital marketing decisions. As that work matured, he built SaaS products that operationalized the approach for dealer groups, earning two AWA recognitions in 2020, including Innovator in Dealership Management and Rising Star in Business Intelligence, before selling the software business that same year.
He later co-founded AET Automotive, a dealership marketing technology company where he served as President, CFO, and CTO. At AET, Grace helped shape strategy, operations, and product through key growth phases before divesting in 2024 to pursue new entrepreneurial work.
Through Canopy Ventures, his Vermont-based consulting and venture practice, Grace has continued building and advising technology companies across industries, staying close to early-stage product problems, technical architecture, and long-horizon thinking.
Most recently, Grace founded MeCaptcha, a human-verification platform focused on helping developers and online communities establish proof of human authenticity through everyday verification actions. That focus on trust, identity, and human signal aligns closely with Hrizn’s broader vision for the future of dealership visibility.
Hrizn CEO David Gruhin, a former dealership general manager who co-founded the company in 2023, said Grace’s background is rare precisely because it spans both sides of the industry.
“Most CTOs either know software or know automotive retail,” Gruhin said. “James has operated inside both — and he was a car guy long before he was a CTO. That combination is genuinely rare. He’s also not someone who takes on new work casually. The fact that he chose Hrizn tells you something about what he sees here.”
Hrizn was built on the conviction that most dealership content stacks were designed for a different era — one defined by one-off SEO pushes, fragmented vendors, paid media dependency, and content treated as a creative task rather than a compounding asset.
The company’s Content Operating System helps dealerships create, govern, publish, distribute, and measure content systematically, building authority across organic search, AI-generated answers, local discovery surfaces, and connected social channels.
“James joining Hrizn is a major step forward for our platform and our customers,” said Matt Copley, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Hrizn. “He understands that the next era of automotive visibility will not be won by more disconnected tools, generic AI output, or another layer of marketing theater. It will be won by infrastructure — systems that help dealerships capture real expertise, structure it properly, distribute it consistently, and turn it into durable authority. James has built across automotive, analytics, SaaS, and human-verification technology. That mix is incredibly aligned with where Hrizn is going.”
Copley added that Grace’s arrival comes at a pivotal moment for the company and the broader market.
“Dealerships are rich in knowledge, but historically poor at making that knowledge visible,” Copley said. “The sales floor knows what shoppers are asking. Service advisors know what owners are confused about. Managers know where trust is won or lost. Hrizn exists to help dealers turn that real-world expertise into structured content infrastructure. James gives us the technical leadership to keep scaling that vision with the rigor, speed, and product imagination it deserves.”
Grace said the opportunity ahead is both technical and strategic.
“Content is no longer just marketing,” Grace said. “It’s infrastructure. That’s not a marketing line… it’s an engineering truth. The companies that figure out how to treat it that way are going to be significantly harder to displace. That’s the kind of problem I want to work on.”
As CTO, Grace will lead Hrizn’s technology strategy across product architecture, AI systems, platform scalability, data infrastructure, integrations, analytics, and future capabilities that support dealership-wide content participation.
His appointment comes as Hrizn continues expanding its platform, including Social Hub, Hrizn Bio, Creator App development, inventory content automation, structured content workflows, AI-assisted research, local and social distribution, and measurement tools built specifically for automotive retail.
“The industry is entering a new visibility era,” Gruhin said. “AI search, organic discovery, social distribution, and local trust are converging. Dealers do not need another point solution. They need an operating system for how their expertise becomes visible. That is what Hrizn is building, and James is the right technology leader to help us take that work even further.”
Hrizn is the Content Operating System for automotive dealership visibility. Built for the AI search era, Hrizn helps dealerships create, govern, publish, distribute, and measure structured content that earns authority across organic search, AI answers, social channels, and local discovery surfaces — replacing fragmented vendor stacks with a single, systematic platform.
Founded in 2023, Hrizn is trusted by dealer groups, agencies, and single rooftops nationwide.
Learn more at https://hrizn.io.
Media Contact
Matt Copley | press@hrizn.io
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