ot-cybersecurity
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Dragos Turned a Three-Person Side Project Into Security for the Machines Nobody Can Reboot
Dragos began with three practitioners, a packet-capture tool, and a founder who did not want to become a software vendor. A decade later, its field notes defend grids, factories and water systems - and explain why industrial security cannot be treated like office IT.
DeNexus
DeNexus is a Boston-based cyber risk company that quantifies the financial impact of cyber threats to industrial and operational technology (OT) environments. Its DeRISK platform uses AI, machine learning and simulation to predict where breaches are likely in OT/ICS networks, express that risk in dollar terms, and prioritize mitigation by ROI. The company serves CISOs, boards, risk managers and cyber insurers across data centers, energy, manufacturing and transportation, and has expanded into agentic-AI underwriting automation for the industrial cyber insurance market.
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.
Adam Gluck
Adam Gluck is the CEO and co-founder of Copia Automation, a New York startup bringing Git-based source control and DevOps practices to the world of industrial controls and PLC programming. A former staff software engineer at Uber, where he was a founding member of the Engineering Strategy team and helped design DOMA, Uber's microservice architecture, Gluck set out to give the engineers who program factory floors the same modern tooling that software teams take for granted. He co-founded Copia with Matthew Lee, raised over $16 million from investors including Lux Capital and Construct Capital, and was named to the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Manufacturing and Industry.
Copia Automation
Copia Automation brings modern software practices - Git-based version control, automated backup, code review, and AI-assisted analysis - to the world of industrial automation. Its platform treats PLC and OT code as a critical asset, giving manufacturers visibility, change tracking, and disaster recovery across multi-vendor factory floors. Founded in New York in 2020 by former Uber engineer Adam Gluck, Copia helps plants protect against downtime, ransomware, and lost institutional knowledge while accelerating how industrial machinery is built and maintained.
Airgap Networks Inc. (Acquired by Zscaler)
Airgap Networks was a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company that built an agentless Zero Trust segmentation platform to stop ransomware and lateral threat movement across enterprise IT, IoT, and OT networks. Using a patented DHCP-proxy architecture, it placed every device in a 'network of one' (a /32 segment) without agents, APIs, or infrastructure upgrades, and shipped an industry-first Ransomware Kill Switch. Founded in 2019 by Ritesh Agrawal and Satish Mohan, the company raised $18.6M before being acquired by Zscaler in April 2024 to extend Zscaler's Zero Trust SASE platform with firewall-free, east-west segmentation.
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.