data-security
(15)
Abhi Sharma
For Abhi Sharma, the useful map is never the static one. From a college navigation experiment to Relyance AI's moving graph of enterprise data, his career has followed one question: can software reveal what people cannot see?
Tarique Mustafa
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.
Nitay Milner
Nitay Milner is co-founder and CEO of ORION Security, a New York and Tel Aviv-based startup rebuilding data loss prevention around AI that learns how data actually moves inside a company. He raised a $32M Series A led by Norwest in February 2026, with IBM participating, less than a year after a $6M seed. Before ORION he was a senior product leader at Epsagon (acquired by Cisco for around $500M) and previously co-founded DatsMi, an event-media startup.
James Pham
James Pham is the co-founder and CEO of Opsin, a San Francisco-area startup securing how enterprises adopt generative AI. After validating the problem through more than 300 conversations with industry leaders, he built Opsin to detect and remediate data oversharing in tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, and has since expanded it into a full enterprise agent security platform. An immigrant from Vietnam with an MIT MBA and a machine-learning product background from Abnormal Security, Pham now leads a company in production at regulated healthcare, manufacturing, and financial-services organizations.
Elizabeth Nammour
Elizabeth Nammour is the co-founder and CEO of Teleskope, a New York-based data security company she launched in 2022 after wrestling with petabyte-scale data sprawl as a security engineer at Airbnb. Teleskope bills itself as the industry's first agentic data security platform, autonomously scanning, classifying, and remediating sensitive data so organizations can adopt AI without losing track of their information. In late 2025 the company raised a $25 million Series A led by M13, bringing total funding to $32.2 million, on the back of 600% year-over-year growth and an 85% pilot-to-paid conversion rate.
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.
Balaji Ganesan
Balaji Ganesan is Co-Founder and CEO of Privacera (now Trust3 AI), the data security and AI governance platform built on top of Apache Ranger technology he co-created. A survivor of the Miracle on the Hudson, he co-founded XA Secure in 2013, which was acquired by Hortonworks and open-sourced as Apache Ranger — now deployed across thousands of enterprises globally. He launched Privacera in 2016 to extend that governance vision to multi-cloud environments, raised $67.3M in total funding, and counts Nike, Intuit, and Autodesk among his customers.
Mahmoud Abdelkader
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Dharmesh Thakker
Dharmesh Thakker is a General Partner at Battery Ventures, one of the world's longest-running technology venture capital firms, where he leads investments in infrastructure software, AI-powered applications, cloud/DevOps, data, security, and open source. An immigrant from India turned engineer turned VC, he joined Battery in 2015 after leading Intel Capital's global cloud and big-data practice. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from UT Austin and an MBA from Wharton. His portfolio spans category-defining companies including Databricks, Postman, Gong, ClickHouse, and Weaviate, with notable exits including Confluent (IPO), JFrog (IPO), and Sumo Logic (IPO). He hosts the 'Billion-Dollar B2B' podcast, writes for TechCrunch and Forbes, and was named to the Forbes Midas Brink list in 2016.
In Sik Rhee
In Sik Rhee is the Founder and General Partner of Vertex Ventures US, a Palo Alto-based venture firm focused exclusively on early-stage enterprise software. He co-founded two companies that sold for a combined $1.8 billion - Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape in 1997) and Opsware (acquired by HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion) - before transitioning into venture capital. At Vertex Ventures US, he backs pre-revenue founders in enterprise infrastructure, data platforms, and open-source software at the Seed and Series A stages, with notable portfolio wins including LaunchDarkly, Cyberhaven, and Evisort (acquired by Workday).
Joe Eandi
Joe Eandi is a General Partner and Co-Founder of Cyber Mentor Fund, a mentorship-driven early-stage venture fund exclusively focused on cybersecurity startups. A former attorney turned tech executive turned founder turned investor, Eandi brings an unusually wide arc to his work: he started as a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini, served as General Counsel at Inktomi through its Yahoo acquisition, spent seven years as SVP and GM at LiveOps, founded and ran BrightPoint Security (acquired by ServiceNow in 2016), and then co-founded Cyber Mentor Fund in 2018 alongside Tim Eades. CMF deploys $100K-$5M from pre-seed through Series A into cybersecurity startups, with over 35 portfolio companies, three unicorns, and four successful exits including Okera (Databricks), Revelstoke (Arctic Wolf), Message Control (Mimecast), and LeakSignal (F5).
Andre Weiglein
Andre Weiglein is the President and CEO of AER Worldwide, an IT asset disposition (ITAD) company he founded in 1996 and has led for nearly three decades. Based in California, AER operates globally across North America, Europe, and Asia, providing certified asset recovery, secure data destruction, electronics recycling, and reverse logistics for enterprises. Under Weiglein's leadership, AER has grown to approximately 175 employees, ~$48M in revenue, and maintains R2/RIOS and E-Stewards certifications — positioning the company as a responsible, compliance-focused leader in the growing ITAD industry.
Rob Reis
Rob Reis is the founder and President/CEO of Higher Ground LLC, a Palo Alto-based satellite telecommunications company building the world's most compact, affordable, and secure satellite communicator. With roots at Stanford and a career spanning pioneering ventures in laser turntables (Finial Technology), RFID tracking (Savi Technology), and innovation leadership at Texas Instruments, Reis brings decades of deep-tech entrepreneurship to a mission-critical problem: keeping people connected and safe anywhere on Earth, from the backcountry to the battlefield. His flagship product, the SatPaq, uses geostationary satellites with AES-256 encryption and spread spectrum signaling to deliver two-way messaging, voice, and GPS-backup - independent of cellular infrastructure.
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.
Rohan Sathe
Rohan Sathe is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nightfall AI, the AI-native data loss prevention platform built for the modern enterprise. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and nationally ranked chess player, Sathe co-founded Nightfall in 2018 after leading backend engineering at Uber Eats, where managing petabytes of sensitive data across fragmented SaaS systems exposed the deep inadequacy of legacy DLP tools. Nightfall has raised $60.3M in total funding and is redefining how enterprises protect sensitive data across SaaS apps, endpoints, browsers, and AI workflows.