Secretary of Commerce and Trade for the Commonwealth of Virginia
Caren Merrick has served as Secretary of Commerce and Trade for the Commonwealth of Virginia since January of 2022. She oversees 13 agencies with 1,300 team members and a $3B budget. Caren leads economic growth through a variety of initiatives and agencies to generate an environment that makes Virginia the best place to start, grow, or relocate a business.
Merrick is a business leader in Virginia with over 25 years of experience launching growth companies and reinventing businesses.
In the private sector Caren is known as a strategic and entrepreneurial leader. She co-founded enterprise software company webMethods, growing it from zero to $200m and the most successful software IPO in history at offering. webMethods was sold to SoftwareAG for nearly $600m. She was founder and CEO of Pocket Mentor, a mobile app delivering leadership tools. She is a partner in NextGen Venture Partners investing in category defining early stage companies.
Caren has served on boards of public and private growth companies with combined assets of $12B and revenues of $3B across a variety of sectors, specializing in private equity, financial services and REITs. She has been named a Top 500 Business Influencer by Virginia Business Magazine.
Caren has been a board member at a number of non-profit boards, including the webMethods Foundation, which she co-founded. Caren also served six years as a board director for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, and served on the board of the DC Chapter of the International Women’s Forum.
Merrick grew up in a rural community and is the first woman in her family to earn a college degree, a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
A Virginia resident since 1988, Caren and her husband, Phillip have been married for 30 years. They have two adult sons.
