data-protection
(16)
The Collect Call That Changed Mychelle Mollot’s Career
A geophysicist called Cognos from a rural Manitoba gas station and found an unexpected vocation. Three decades later, Mychelle Mollot still treats technical fluency, plain speech and curiosity as one job.
Ranga Rajagopalan Is Making Backup Sound Like a Business Strategy
After two decades inside the machinery of data protection, Druva's products-and-marketing chief has a deceptively plain brief: make recovery faster, make the technology quieter, and make the story intelligible.
Angela Heindl-Schober Is Selling the One Thing AI Can’t Automate: Judgment
After three decades marketing enterprise technology across borders, Synack’s CMO has arrived at a timely conviction: AI can accelerate the work, but people still have to own the result.
Mo Tahmasebi Built a Storage Career on the Things Nobody Notices - Until They Break
For four decades, Mo Tahmasebi has worked in the least glamorous corner of technology: keeping important data available, recoverable and out of trouble. His playbook is equal parts engineering, thrift and the confidence to close a deal before the coffee gets cold.
Joe Gaska Keeps Building Companies Around the Past
The Cape Cod native sold one software company, built another, and made a career from a stubborn idea: the future is easier to read when you keep the past.
Ameesh Divatia's Long Game: Make the Data Useless to Thieves
After three acquired companies and a spell as an investor, Ameesh Divatia returned to the operator's chair with a stubborn premise: a breach matters less when the stolen data reveals nothing.
Randy Battat
Randy Battat is the co-founder and CEO of PreVeil, a Boston-based company building end-to-end encrypted email, file sharing and storage for organizations that handle data too sensitive to leave on a server in plaintext. Before betting on cryptography, he ran Airvana through the mobile-broadband boom, spent thirteen years at Apple shipping the PowerBook, and led networking at Motorola. His pitch is deceptively simple: you cannot steal what you cannot see.
Bipul Sinha
Bipul Sinha is the CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Rubrik, the publicly traded data security company he built from a Bihar basement story into a $17B+ NYSE-listed cybersecurity platform. Before founding Rubrik in 2014, he spent nearly a decade as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners — backing companies like Nutanix and Hootsuite — and nine years at Oracle holding 30+ patents in distributed computing. An IIT Kharagpur and Wharton alumnus who grew up in poverty in Darbhanga, Bihar, Sinha turned a contrarian bet on backup-and-recovery software into the gold standard for enterprise data resilience in the ransomware era.
Sanjay Poonen
Sanjay Poonen is the CEO and President of Cohesity, the data security and management company that absorbed Veritas' enterprise backup business in late 2024 to become the largest data protection vendor in the world. A Dartmouth-Stanford-Harvard alumnus who arrived in Boston at 18 with fifty dollars, he previously helped double revenues at both SAP (from ~$10B to ~$20B) and VMware (from ~$6B to ~$12B), where as COO he architected the landmark VMware-AWS partnership and the AirWatch acquisition.
Bryan Gobbett
Bryan Gobbett is the Chief Executive Officer of RackWare, a San Jose-based multi-cloud mobility and resiliency platform that has migrated over one million workloads across 60+ countries. With nearly two decades of engineering leadership at companies including Cisco, Ericsson, Dell, and Gigamon, Gobbett brings deep technical credibility to a company quietly becoming essential infrastructure for enterprises navigating hybrid and multi-cloud complexity. Under his leadership, RackWare grew revenue 74.5% to $10.5M ARR in 2024 and secured preferred license partnerships with Oracle, IBM, and Google Cloud.
Chris Babel
Chris Babel is the Chief Executive Officer of Arcserve, an Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based data protection and cyber resilience company serving over 235,000 customers worldwide. With more than two decades navigating the intersection of security, privacy, and enterprise technology, Babel brought a rare cross-disciplinary resume to Arcserve in May 2024: he led TrustArc as CEO for over a decade, transforming a browser-padlock certification company into a global privacy compliance platform, and before that spent years at VeriSign running authentication services across 150-plus countries. His mandate at Arcserve is to rebuild partner trust, simplify a sprawling product catalog, and position the company as the go-to data resilience solution for SMBs and mid-market enterprises facing relentless ransomware threats.
Alastair Paterson
Alastair Paterson is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonic Security, a San Francisco-based startup building language models that protect enterprise data as employees pour it into generative AI tools. He previously co-founded Digital Shadows in a London kitchen in 2011 and ran it for eleven years through to its $160M acquisition by ReliaQuest in 2022. A Bristol-trained engineer who cut his teeth at BAE Systems Detica, he is now back on his second cybersecurity company, this one wagering that coaching beats blocking.
Sumit Dhawan
Sumit Dhawan is the CEO of Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity company protecting over 85 Fortune 100 companies with $2B+ in ARR. With 25+ years building enterprise software businesses at Citrix, Instart, and VMware (where he drove $13B in revenue as President), Dhawan joined Proofpoint in November 2023 with a mandate to unify human-centric security and grow toward $5B ARR by 2030. He is known for championing the idea that 95% of cybersecurity failures trace to human error - and that defending people is the only real way to defend organizations.
Vishal Gauri
Vishal Gauri is the CEO of Seclore, a data-centric security company protecting enterprise information in the AI era. A scientist-turned-entrepreneur with 18 patents and a PhD from Ohio State, he built his career from General Electric labs to Silicon Valley boardrooms, co-founded a venture capital fund (IvyCap Ventures), and now leads a $59.5M-revenue company that guards sensitive data as it flows across organizations, borders, and AI systems.
Poojan Kumar
Poojan Kumar is a serial entrepreneur and cloud infrastructure pioneer who co-founded Clumio, a cloud-native backup-as-a-service company that raised $261M before being acquired by Commvault in September 2024. A Stanford-educated IIT Bombay alumnus, Kumar previously co-founded PernixData (acquired by Nutanix in 2016) and was the founding engineer behind Oracle Exadata. At Clumio he built one of the leading AWS data protection platforms, amassing 1,000+ enterprise customers including Atlassian and LexisNexis, and now serves as Chief Product Innovation Officer at Commvault.
Dmitry Dontov
Dmitry Dontov is the CEO and co-founder of Spin.AI, a Palo Alto-based SaaS security platform that protects mission-critical cloud data across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Slack. With over 20 years in cybersecurity, two patents to his name, and $21.5M raised including a K1 Investment Management round in March 2026, Dontov has built a platform serving 1,500+ organizations across 100+ countries. A Forbes Business Council member, Young Entrepreneur Council contributor, and columnist for Dark Reading, he's positioned Spin.AI as a Forrester Wave Strong Performer in SaaS Security Posture Management.