The CEO of CyberSaint has spent his career doing one stubborn thing: making cyber risk something a boardroom can actually read. Not alerts. Not fear. A number, in dollars, next to every other line on the balance sheet.
Chief Executive Officer, CyberSaint // Boston, Massachusetts
Jerry Layden runs a company built on a deceptively simple frustration. For years, cybersecurity lived in a strange corner of the business - urgent enough to keep executives awake, but vague enough that no one could say what it was worth. A CISO could warn a board about threats all day. What the board wanted was a figure. How much risk are we carrying, and what does it cost us if it goes wrong?
That gap is where CyberSaint sits, and Layden is the executive steering it. As Chief Executive Officer of the Boston-based company, he leads a platform, CyberStrong, that uses AI and actuarial data to automate compliance work and translate cyber risk into financial terms. The pitch is not about scaring anyone. It is about clarity - giving executives a scoreboard for a problem that used to arrive only as a vague sense of dread.
The company's stated mission reads like a mandate Layden has taken personally: to make a cybersecurity program as clear, actionable, and measurable as any other business function. In practice that means real-time risk monitoring, automated control scoring, and board-level reporting that speaks the language of the people writing the checks.
Layden did not come up through the security world. He came up through infrastructure. He spent 18 years at Dell EMC, an unusually long run at a single company for a technology executive, rising to Vice President of Global Accounts. There he worked across global sales, specialty sales, and the alliance and channel organizations - the machinery of selling complex technology to large enterprises. It was a deep education in how big companies buy, how partnerships get built, and how to move products at scale.
Then, in 2018, he made the jump most people at his level do not make. He left a technology giant for an early-stage startup betting on an idea that was still unfashionable at the time: that cyber risk could and should be quantified in financial terms. He joined CyberSaint not as CEO but as Chief Revenue Officer, taking responsibility for global sales, enablement, partnerships, strategic alliances, customer success, and marketing operations.
Layden's timing at CyberSaint was rough by design. He led revenue straight into the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that flattened a lot of sales organizations. His did the opposite. He drove triple-digit year-over-year growth through the disruption, building the strategic partnership and customer acquisition approaches that carried the company forward. It is the kind of stretch that tends to get noticed internally.
It got him promoted. In September 2021, CyberSaint named Layden Chief Executive Officer. Moving directly from Chief Revenue Officer to CEO is a rare progression - the two jobs demand different instincts - but it made a certain sense here. The person who had spent three years learning exactly how customers understood, or misunderstood, cyber risk was now the one setting the company's direction.
What sets Layden apart is less technical than translational. He advises CEOs and boards at critical infrastructure organizations on navigating regulatory change, technology trends, and the shifting dynamics of the boardroom itself. His career reads as a study in one skill: taking something complicated and expensive and making it legible to the people who decide budgets.
That shows up in his writing too. As a member of the Forbes Business Council, Layden has published on justifying security spend, automating compliance with AI, assessing threats, and treating cyber risk as a boardroom priority rather than an IT footnote. The through-line is consistent. Security only gets funded when it can be measured, and it only gets measured when someone translates it into the vocabulary of finance.
Under his leadership, CyberSaint has kept earning outside validation. The company raised a $21M Series A in March 2024, pushing total funding to roughly $36M, and was recognized that same year in a Gartner Innovation Insight report on how cyber governance, risk, and compliance can be streamlined. For a company of its size - a lean operation in Boston's Seaport district - that is a meaningful footprint.
CyberSaint's approach leans on established risk frameworks rather than reinventing them. The platform stitches together the standards security and risk teams already trust, then automates the tedious parts - control scoring, evidence collection, benchmarking - so the output lands as something an executive can act on. The frameworks below are the grammar of that translation.
The result is a company that, under Layden, has quietly positioned itself in a category that barely existed when he joined - cyber risk quantification - and made the case that it belongs at the top of the corporate agenda. Not because the threats got scarier, though they did, but because he found a way to put them in a form the boardroom could finally do something about.
Make cyber risk as measurable as any other business function.The CyberSaint mission Layden leads
Jerry Layden is the Chief Executive Officer of CyberSaint, a Boston-based cybersecurity software company focused on cyber risk management and quantification.
No. Layden is CEO but not the founder. CyberSaint was founded by Padraic O'Reilly, who serves as Chief Innovation Officer. Layden became CEO in September 2021.
He spent 18 years at Dell EMC, most recently as Vice President of Global Accounts, before joining CyberSaint as Chief Revenue Officer in 2018.
CyberSaint builds the CyberStrong platform, which uses AI and actuarial data to automate compliance and quantify cyber risk in financial terms for boards and executives.
CyberSaint is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, in the Seaport district at 374 Congress St.