operational-technology
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Joe Scotto Made Invisible Cyber Risks Impossible to Ignore
Across factories, hospitals and the human side of security, Joe Scotto built a career translating hidden cyber risk into stories that executives could see, measure and act on. Two startups he marketed were acquired within four years.
Jose Seara
Jose Seara is the founder and CEO of DeNexus, a Boston-based company that quantifies cyber risk for operational technology and industrial control systems. A naval and marine engineer by training, he spent nearly two decades building critical infrastructure and renewable energy companies across Europe and North America before pivoting to cybersecurity. He started DeNexus after discovering, as an energy operator, that he could not measure his own company's cyber risk or insure against it. His DeRISK platform turns technical threat data into financial metrics that boards and insurers can act on.
Ian Schmertzler
Ian Schmertzler is co-CEO and co-founder of Dispel, an operational-technology cybersecurity company he started in 2015 with his brother Ethan. A Yale-trained industrial engineer and former crew coxswain, Ian helped build Dispel's zero trust platform around Moving Target Defense - a system that keeps shifting network access points so attackers never find a static target. He serves as a principal investigator on three NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence projects and as vice president of the National Defense Industrial Association's NY-CT chapter, working to keep factories, water utilities, and power grids running quietly and safely.
Josh Lospinoso
Josh Lospinoso is the co-founder and former CEO of Shift5, an observability and cybersecurity company that protects the onboard operational technology of planes, trains, tanks, and ships. A West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and Oxford-trained statistician, he spent more than a decade as an Army cyber officer building elite hacking tools for the NSA's Tailored Access Operations and the Cyber National Mission Force. Before Shift5 he co-founded RedOwl Analytics (acquired by Raytheon/Forcepoint in 2017). He wrote the C++ course that U.S. Cyber Command uses to train junior developers and turned it into the book C++ Crash Course. In January 2026 he moved from CEO to the board to focus on long-term vision while Shift5, having raised more than $180M, scaled past 130 employees.