Tarique Mustafa is a Silicon Valley cybersecurity founder, engineer and AI researcher who serves as CEO, CTO and founder of Chorology, Inc., a San Jose company applying deep AI to automate data discovery, classification, mapping and compliance enforcement for enterprises. A serial entrepreneur with two prior startups that ended in acquisitions, he previously founded GhangorCloud, a pioneer of fourth-generation data leak prevention, and held senior roles at Symantec, MCI WorldCom and others. He holds dual master's degrees and did PhD research in AI at USC, and holds multiple patents in deep AI.
Chorology, Inc. is a San Jose-based data security and compliance startup that uses a Deep-AI 'knowledge encoding' engine - rather than conventional machine learning - to automatically discover, classify, and map an enterprise's sensitive data across structured and unstructured repositories. Its flagship platform, CAPE (Compliance and Posture Enforcer), aims to give organizations a continuous, mandate-agnostic view of where regulated data lives so they can enforce data security posture and meet frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Founded by serial cybersecurity entrepreneur Tarique Mustafa, the company emerged from stealth in July 2024 with $9M in funding and a roster of early Fortune 500 users.
Theom is a San Jose-based data security company building what it calls an AI-native Data Operations Center - a platform that discovers, classifies, tracks and protects enterprise data across cloud data lakes, warehouses, SaaS and generative-AI environments. Rather than guarding infrastructure or access alone, Theom takes a data-first approach: it maps who can touch which data, scores the financial value and risk of that data, detects breach behavior mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and enforces policy in real time. Founded in December 2020 by former Cisco/Tetration and Google engineers, it raised a $20M Series A in May 2025 led by Wing VC with strategic backers Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures and SentinelOne's S Ventures, and counts Fiserv, Grammarly, Tradeweb and JetBlue among its customers.