identity-security
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Manny Ataebi Learned the Code. Then He Learned to Sell the Story.
A six-year apprenticeship in code gave Manny Ataebi an uncommon marketing instinct: understand the machinery, strip away the jargon, and make the buyer care.
Martha Walchuk Makes Complicated Technology Make Sense
Before AI agents needed identities, customer-service agents needed better tools. Martha Walchuk has built a career in the difficult middle ground where enterprise software, human judgment, and the machinery of marketing meet.
Laura Marx Makes the Invisible Business of Identity Impossible to Ignore
She started by teaching tennis, built a global marketing career from outside the office, and now gives RSA's identity-security ambitions a human vocabulary. Laura Marx's subject is access; her method is connection.
Kevin Spurway Makes Complicated Software Sound Simple
A Harvard-trained lawyer found his calling in enterprise software, then built a career turning dense technology into clear language at the moments companies needed it most.
Thomas LeDuc Put Cybersecurity’s Invisible Defenders on the Big Screen
He helped take Semperis from a few million dollars in recurring revenue to centaur status. Then the Detroit-area CMO returned to filmmaking to tell the human story behind cyber defense.
Tarah Cammett Makes Cybersecurity Sound Human
The Silverfort CMO has spent more than two decades translating complicated software into stories people can act on. Her more revealing craft, though, is building teams with empathy, candor and a conspicuous sense of fun.
Jonathan Skinner Has Spent a Career Making Invisible Trust Visible
From a seven-person rebrand team at Sectigo to the problem of governing AI identities at Portnox, Jonathan Skinner has built a career translating security machinery into a story the market can act on.
Mike Puterbaugh Came Back to Sell the Hardest Thing in Cybersecurity: Clarity
After more than 25 years translating technical risk into business language, the San Diego executive has returned to BeyondTrust with a familiar brief and a much larger map: make identity security understandable without sanding off its complexity.
John Knightly Learned Marketing Between a Potter’s Wheel and a Chalkboard
The Netwrix CMO grew up between clay and mathematics, then built a career translating enterprise technology into stories buyers can use. His latest assignment is making data and identity security legible in the age of AI.
Dayna Rothman Learned Marketing by Writing It Down
Before Dayna Rothman ran marketing teams, she learned the whole department one interview at a time. Writing became her apprenticeship - and eventually her route into the C-suite.
Kate Reed Markets the Quietest Outcome in Cybersecurity
After more than two decades turning dense enterprise technology into plain-spoken stories, Delinea’s CMO is selling an unusual promise: the reassuring calm of nothing going wrong.
Clarissa Cerda Learned to Navigate the Gray. Now the Gray Can Talk Back.
The former White House lawyer has spent three decades where technology outruns the rulebook. At Pindrop, she is helping decide what trust should mean when a familiar voice may be synthetic.
Jason Martin Built for the Breach - Then AI Gave Every Machine a Badge
After 25 years in cybersecurity, Martin stopped treating identity as a login problem and started following what every human, machine, and AI agent did next. That bet took Permiso from 100 interviews before code to an acquisition by Okta.
Raj Mallempati Is Securing the People - and Machines - Behind the Code
After an engineering-to-marketing career and a Microsoft acquisition, Raj Mallempati returned to the permissions problem with a sharper question: who - or what - is allowed to touch the software pipeline?
John Hernandez Has Spent 30 Years Teaching Big Software to Change Its Mind
From call centers to identity systems to the security operations center, Hernandez keeps arriving when a sprawling enterprise platform needs a new shape. At BlueVoyant, the assignment is to make cyber defense faster, more unified, and useful with or without a managed service wrapped around it.
Art Gilliland Built a Career Around One Question: Who Gets In?
From malware patents and a college bouncer shift to the age of autonomous agents, Delinea’s CEO has spent 25 years turning access into a question of judgment.
Andrew Sy Is Teaching Software to Read the Room
After building inference systems at Scale AI and security software at Opal, the math-competition alumnus is betting that better growth technology begins with a modest skill: knowing when not to interrupt.
Andrew Hantzis Found His Niche in the People Behind the Passwords
For 15 years, Andrew Hantzis has recruited in technology. The useful twist is that he spent the last decade going narrow - deep into identity security, where every new machine account and AI agent creates another human problem to solve.
Abhay Kulkarni Bet the Breach Happens After Login
After scaling clouds for tens of millions of users, Abhay Kulkarni returned to cybersecurity with a stubborn question: why do defenses stop watching at the moment an identity gets in? WideField followed the session instead - all the way back to Cisco.
Lior Yaari Is Building Security for the Software Nobody Approved
Employees can adopt a new app before IT finishes its first coffee. Grip Security's co-founder wants to preserve that speed while giving security teams a map, a set of controls, and fewer nasty surprises.
Rita Gurevich Built a Cybersecurity Company From the Mess Nobody Wanted to Clean Up
After Lehman Brothers collapsed, Rita Gurevich learned that the hardest technology problem was often the least glamorous: working out who owned what and who should have access. She turned that lesson into SPHERE, then spent eleven years bootstrapping before taking outside capital.
Rakesh Soni Built a Business Around the Moment Before ‘Welcome’
A clumsy registration form gave Rakesh Soni his opening. Thirteen years later, LoginRadius manages the quiet exchange of trust between global brands and more than a billion digital identities.
Bala Venkatramani’s Long Bet on Less Friction
After more than sixteen years inside Zoho, the product leader started Securden with a stubborn premise: enterprise security works better when people can actually use it. The bet now stretches from privileged passwords to AI agents.
Vivek Nair
Vivek Nair is the co-founder and CEO of Multifactor (YC F25), an applied cryptography company building zero-trust authentication, authorization, and auditing for AI agents. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley at 22 as a Hertz Fellow, published landmark work on privacy in virtual reality, and served as a technical lead in cyber units at the Department of Defense and CIA before starting the company.
Danny Brickman
Danny Brickman is the co-founder and CEO of Oasis Security, a New York and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company building the first enterprise platform for non-human identity management and agentic access management. A former Israel Defense Forces cyber R&D leader with 11 years of service and an Israel Defense Prize to his name, Brickman started Oasis in 2022 with Amit Zimerman to tackle the fast-growing security gap around machine identities, which now outnumber human identities by roughly 20 to 1. The company has raised about $195 million, backed by Sequoia, Accel, Cyberstarts and Craft Ventures.
Itamar Apelblat
Itamar Apelblat is the co-founder and CEO of Token Security, a cybersecurity company focused on securing non-human identities (NHIs) - the service accounts, API tokens, workloads, and AI agents that now vastly outnumber human users inside enterprises. A veteran of Israel's Unit 8200 with more than 15 years in cybersecurity, he founded Token Security in 2023 with Ido Shlomo after encountering a forgotten contractor service account that still had full access to a company's systems. The company emerged from stealth in 2024 and raised a $20M Series A in January 2025, relocating its headquarters to New York as enterprises race to secure the machine-first, AI-agent era.
Jasson Casey
Jasson Casey is the CEO and cofounder of Beyond Identity, a New York-based identity security company that builds passwordless, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication designed to make identity-based attacks impossible. An engineer with a PhD from Texas A&M and more than two decades in security and networking, Casey has held senior technical leadership roles at IronNet Cybersecurity and SecurityScorecard, founded the software-defined networking ventures Flowgrammable and Compiled Networks, and served as a cybersecurity fellow at CSIS. He now argues that flaws in identity systems, not passwords alone, are the root cause of modern breaches and that cryptographically device-bound credentials are the way to stop phishing, credential theft, and AI deepfakes at the source.
Yoni Shohet
Yoni Shohet is the co-founder and CEO of Valence Security, a New York-based company that helps enterprises find and fix risks hiding inside their sprawling web of SaaS apps. A serial cybersecurity entrepreneur, he earned a math degree at 19, led a cybersecurity team inside one of Israel's elite military intelligence units, and previously co-founded SCADAfence, an industrial IoT security pioneer later acquired by Honeywell. He raised a $25M Series A led by Microsoft's M12 in 2022, bringing Valence to $32M in total funding.
Howard Ting
Howard Ting is the CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity-security company building a unified control plane for access governance. He took the top job in November 2025 after more than five years running Cyberhaven and two-plus decades scaling category-defining security and enterprise-software companies including Palo Alto Networks, Nutanix, Redis, Zscaler, and RSA Security. A marketing-and-product operator who once demoed Azure Active Directory on stage with Bill Gates, Ting now bets that the hardest unsolved problem in security is authorization: deciding what any human, service, or AI agent should be allowed to do, and for how long.
Umaimah Khan
Umaimah Khan is the co-founder and CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity security company building the controls that decide who - and increasingly what - can access an organization's systems. A homeschooled math kid who entered MIT at 16 and fell for cryptography, she did research embedded with government agencies including DARPA, then engineered infrastructure and security at two startups that became unicorns. She founded Opal in 2020 to treat authorization as the hard technical problem she believes it is, and has raised roughly $32M, including a $22M Series B in December 2023. Opal's customers include Cloudflare, Figma, Databricks, Scale AI, Grammarly and Perplexity.