At Threat.Technology we track over 100,000 infosec, cyber security, military and cyber startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top California, United States based CEO’ operating in the Privacy space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on [email protected].
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Anshu Sharma
Co-founder & CEO of Skyflow
Co-founder & CEO at Skyflow. Previously co-founded Clearedin and Suki. Partner at Storm Ventures. VP of Product & Strategy at Salesforce. Failed to build cloud at Oracle in 2007.
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About ClearedIn, Skyflow: Skyflow builds a secure data privacy platform fronted by an API so all this data is secure and used as promised.
MacLane Wilkison
Co-Founder & CEO of NuCypher
MacLane Wilkison is the cofounder and CEO of NuCypher, a Y Combinator and Polychain Capital-backed company that provides decentralized key management and cryptographic access controls for decentralized applications. He is a software engineer and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where he provided M&A and financing services to enterprises in technology, media, and telecommunications. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), and certified Financial Risk Manager.
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About NuCypher: NuCypher is a cryptography company that builds privacy-preserving infrastructure and protocols.
Raullen Chai
CEO, Co-Founder of IoTeX
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About IoTeX: IoTeX is the leading decentralized network to power billions of machines at scale, drive the machine economy (machinefi) applications.
Daniel Barber
CEO & Co-founder of DataGrail
Daniel Barber is the CEO & Co-founder of DataGrail. Prior to DataGrail, Daniel built and led go-to-market teams at Responsys (acquired by Oracle), ToutApp (acquired by Marketo), Node.io, Datanyze (ZoomInfo), and DocuSign.
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About DataGrail, Forbes Technology Council, GTM Orchestration: DataGrail is a data privacy startup that helps businesses navigate the growing array of privacy regulations.
Ian Coe
CEO and Co-Founder of Tonic.ai
Ian Coe is the CEO and Co-Founder at Tonic. For over a decade, Ian has worked to advance the use of data by removing barriers impeding teams from answering their most important questions. As an early member of the commercial division at Palantir Technologies, he led teams solving data problems in industries ranging from financial services to the media. At Tableau, he continued to focus on analytics, driving the vision around statistics and the calculation language. As a founder of Tonic, Ian is directing his energies toward synthetic data generation to break down traditional data silos, protect customer privacy, and drive analytic efficiency.
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About Tonic.ai: Tonic mimics your production data to create safe, useful, de-identified data for QA, testing, and development.
Pravin Kothari
Founder & CEO of CipherCloud
Pravin Kothari is the founder and CEO of CipherCloud.He founded CipherCloud in 2010 when he recognized that while the cloud was disrupting enterprise IT with explosive growth, the security technologies had not kept pace and enterprises were losing control over their sensitive data. Pravin is driving the rapid growth of CipherCloud by managing its business, strategy, and operations. Pravin is a security visionary with more than 20 years of experience building industry-leading companies and bringing innovative products to market. Pravin was the Founder & CTO of Agiliance, a leading Security Risk Management company, and Co-founder & VP Engineering of ArcSight, a leading security company, which was acquired by HP for $1.6 billion. Previously, Pravin was Co-founder & Chief Architect at Impresse Corporation and also held technical leadership positions at Verity, Attachmate, and Tata Consultancy Services. Pravin holds over a dozen patents in security technologies and is the inventor behind CipherCloud’s groundbreaking cloud encryption technology.
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About CipherCloud, RiskVision: CipherCloud is a cloud security company that provides a platform that delivers data protection, compliance, and control.
Jad Boutros
CEO, Co-Founder of TerraTrue
Jad is the CEO and co-founder at TerraTrue. Previously, he was the Chief Security Officer at Snap Inc where he led security, privacy engineering and spam and abuse. Jad worked at Google for over 9 years conducting application security reviews, developing robust security defenses, and managing security. Jad holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from McGill University and a Master’s in computer science from Stanford University.
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About TerraTrue: TerraTrue is a privacy platform designed to work with product development.
Ray Kruck
Founder and CEO of Tugboat Logic
Ray Kruck cofounded Nexgate in 2011 with a breakthrough platform to help brands discover, monitor, and secure their social presence. Nexgate was acquired by Proofpoint (NASDAQ: PFPT) as their largest acquisition in 2014. Prior to Nexgate, Ray held executive and leadership positions in corporate development, strategy, and sales at Check Point Software, Websense, and Voltage Security (acquired by HP). Since Nexgate, Ray cofounded Pointgrey Partners, an early-stage venture investment firm focused on deep technology plays that drive competitive disruption in enterprise and life science markets. Ray is passionate about helping founders build go-to market ecosystems that enable leveraged sales models with strategic partners. Ray is a University of Toronto B.Comm graduate and holds an MBA from University of British Columbia.
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About Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), Tugboat Logic: Tugboat Logic address the skills and expertise gap in the security and compliance industry.
Abhi Sharma
Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Relyance AI
Entrepreneur, Advisor, Angel Investor, Enterprise SaaS, Machine Learning, Compilers
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About Relyance AI: Manage privacy, data governance, and compliance operations seamlessly, all on a single, intuitive platform.
Ev Kontsevoy
Co-Founder & CEO of Teleport
Ev Kontsevoy is the CEO & Founder at Gravitational.
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About Teleport: Teleport enables engineers to quickly access any computing resource anywhere.
Justin Newton
Co-Founder and CEO of Netki
Justin Newton is the CEO at Netki, Inc.
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About Netki, Singapore University of Social Sciences: The leading provider of tools to foster the adoption of blockchain technology.
James Donelan
Founder, CEO of Trace Data
James brings more than 20+ years of technology and software engineering leadership experience across enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, big data, machine learning, web and mobile. He’s lead technology and engineering at a number of successful hyper growth technology companies, ranging from early stage startups to IPO companies such as MuleSoft, Amplitude, Lithium, Epiphany, Charles Schwab and Compaq. An engineer by heart he loves building stellar product engineering teams and creating innovative and disruptive products.
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About Trace Data: Data observability for a connected world. Trace Data helps companies understand, monitor and secure their data.
Ameesh Divatia
Co-Founder & CEO of Baffle
Ameesh Divatia is CEO & co-founder of Baffle, Inc., which provides an advanced data protection solution for databases. He has a proven track record of turning technologies that are difficult to build into successful businesses, selling three companies for more than $425 million combined in the service provider and enterprise data center infrastructure market. Baffle is Ameesh’s third startup dealing with how data is stored and used in IT. Prior to starting Baffle, he led a premier CMOS photonics innovator (Lightwire Inc.) from technology development into product development leading up to an acquisition by Cisco Systems, Inc. for $271M within a timespan of 29 months. He has also founded two venture-funded startups: Aarohi Communications (Storage Virtualization, acquired by Emulex Corporation for $39M) and PipeLinks Inc. (Optical Networking, acquired by Cisco Systems for $126M).
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About Baffle: Baffle protects data in the cloud by securing the data analytics pipeline for modern enterprises without any code changes or disruption.
Chris Babel
CEO of TrustArc
Chris Babel is the CEO of TRUSTe and a recognized authority on Internet trust and privacy. Chris possesses over a 15 years of experience building online trust, and since joining TRUSTe five years ago has overseen its transformation into the leading global data privacy management company. Chris is a privacy thought leader, as he frequently speaks at industry events such as the IAPP Data Protection Congress, the Privacy Identity Innovation Conference and the IoT Privacy Summit. He is also widely quoted as a privacy expert in well-known publications such as PCWorld, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. Before joining TRUSTe, Chris spent over a decade building online trust, most recently in the security industry as Senior Vice President and General Manager of VeriSign’s worldwide Authentication Services business, where he was responsible for strategy, sales, marketing, product and support. Chris also previously managed VeriSign’s SSL and Managed Security Services business. In these roles he helped grow the businesses though the launch of new products to enterprise and small/medium businesses, international expansion in EMEA and Asia and through acquisition and integration of a number of companies. Chris holds a BA in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and Economics with Highest Distinction from Northwestern University and lives with his wife and three sons in San Francisco.
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About TrustArc: TrustArc provides solutions to manage privacy compliance for the GDPR, CCPA, and other global privacy regulations.
Emmanuel Bamfo
CEO and Co-Founder of Globe
Emmanuel Bamfo is a Co-founder at Globe.
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About Globe, Recharge Labs: Globe provides a real estate platform that allows people to live more comfortably.
Quimby Melton
Co-Founder & CEO of Confection.io
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About Confection.io: Privacy-First Data Generator
Zouhair Belkoura
Founder, CEO of Keepsafe
Zouhair is a serial entrepreneur with an academic past and an infectious success drive. For his EE PhD, Zouhair researched novel video coding algorithms that reduce compression computations by 90% on mobile devices. He went on to build an online retail company (enamora.com) and brought it to several million in revenue before the exit. Aside from success, he also took away expertise on women’s underwear, so ask for fashion advice. At KeepSafe, Zouhair contributes code, image processing expertise and thought leadership in the privacy space. “I’d rather be surfing” is his preferred motto but you’ll find him at the office more often than at the beach. Zouhair drinks Beck’s but other beers will also do.
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About Keepsafe, Mobile Monkeys: KeepSafe is a cloud-based digital platform that allows users to control the privacy of their digital content.
Rehan Jalil
Founder, President and CEO of Securiti
Rehan Jalil is an Entrepreneur, Investor and Limited Partner in technology venture funds. Currently, he is the President, Founder and CEO of SECURITI.ai, the Cloud Services Security Company. He has been Venture Advisor at Mayfield Fund. Rehan Jalil is currently the CEO of SECURITI.ai. He was the SVP and GM for Cloud Security at Symantec, leading research and development for Cloud Security and helping to extend the reach of Symantec enterprise security products to cloud. Rehan came into Symantec with $4.7B acquisition of Bluecoat, where he ran cloud security. He came into BlueCoat via the $280M acquisition of Elastica, that he founded and ran as CEO. Elastica innovated CASB and drove it to become an important security category. Prior to that he was the founder and chief executive officer of WiChours, an innovator in deep packet inspection centered packet core, which was used to deploy some of the earliest 4G networks. WiChorus was acquired by Tellabs for $180M. Previously, he was Chief Architect at Aperto and helped innovate multicore processors at Sun Microsystems. He was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur finalist in 2010 and Top 25 Disruptor in 2015. He holds an AMP from Harvard Business School, an MSEE from Purdue University and a BS from NED University.
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About Securiti: AI Powered Data Security & Privacy | “Most Innovative Startup” RSA | Forrester Wave Leader
Ishaan Nerurkar
Founder & CEO of LeapYear Technologies
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About LeapYear Technologies: LeapYear develops technology for enterprises to securely unlock value from their most sensitive data assets.
Steven Atneosen
CEO & Cofounder of tomtA.ai
Steven Atneosen is a growth operator, advisor, and mentor. He is currently working at Berkeley SkyDeck and NIO as an Advisor.
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About Grand Chasm Ventures, The Hall, tomtA.ai, XPT Global: Data Privacy Delivered at an Individual Level for Builders of Products that Matter
Ashutosh Saxena
Founder and CEO of Caspar.AI
Ashutosh Saxena is the Co-founder and CEO of a high-tech startup Caspar.AI by Brain of Things, with Prof. David Cheriton (Co-founder and Chief Scientist). Here is an article in MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600981/a-robotic-home-that-knows-when-youre-hungover/). If you’re upto taking a new challenge in engineering, systems, robotics, deep learning, or computer vision, drop me a note at: asaxena at cs dot stanford dot edu Previously, Ashutosh spent four years as an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he founded Robot Learning Lab and co-founded Zibby. His vision is to build artificial intelligence for embodied systems such as robots, cars and homes. He received his PhD from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence with Prof. Andrew Ng (advisor), Prof. Sebastian Thrun, Prof. Daphne Koller, and Prof. Stephen Boyd.
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About Caspar.AI, Microsoft: A smart home that cares for you
Jeffrey Tinsley
Founder and CEO of MyLife
As a serial Internet entrepreneur, Jeffrey founded MyLife.com in 2002 and is the company’s CEO and Chairman. He is responsible for the company’s overall direction and strategies toward building the leading social site to help members find and maintain personal AND work connections, all in one place as they define the Personal Relationship Management (PRM) category. Through his direction, MyLife.com has grown consistently to more than 60 million registered members, is adding more than 2 million per month, prompting VentureBeat to write the recent article entitled, “Is MyLife the biggest social site you’ve never heard of?” The company has received many accolades, and Jeffrey himself was recognized as Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009. Previously, Jeffrey was a founder and CEO of GreatDomains.com, the world’s leading secondary domain name marketplace. The company was acquired by publicly-traded VeriSign for $100 million. Jeffrey is also involved in a number of private Internet companies as an investor and advisor.
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About MediaPass, MyLife, MyLife: MyLife provides the leading Reputation Platform, making consumers safer & marketplaces more trusted.
Ted Kim
Chief Executive Officer of Private Internet Access
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About Private Internet Access: Private Internet Access is the leading VPN service.
Mandar Shinde
CEO of Blotout
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About Blotout, Personagraph: The customer data platform reimagined for the trusted enterprise
Todd Weaver
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Purism
Serial entrepreneur and successful businessman, Todd has been recognized for his visionary strategy, technical leadership, and relentless drive, with more than 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, using, installing, and promoting Free Software. Todd has consistently predicted market directions and executed disruptive technologies in a wide range of industries, including in-store entertainment, collaborative financial solutions, and starting the first online cable company. Todd has a deep understanding of the hardware manufacturing process, and an unwavering belief for users to retain their essential freedoms via free software, making Purism (the marriage of high quality hardware and free software), his most ambitious, disruptive, and exciting venture yet.
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About Purism: Purism beautiful computers designed to respect and protect your privacy, security and freedom.
Markus Lampinen
CEO of Prifina
Markus is a serial entrepreneur and loves working with talented, unrelenting teams on ambitious challenges. He’s passionate about personal freedom and how to empower individuals around the world with technology. Markus is currently the CEO of Prifina, a company that aims to give individuals back control of their data. Prior to Prifina, Markus served as CEO of Difitek, an enterprise fintech company, providing a finance back office for modern financial platforms for over 100 companies around the world. Over the past years, Markus has been privileged to work with teams from around the world in powering modern financial applications to serve underserved market segments. He’s been involved in launching new products in financial services, for mission critical, sensitive data and transaction in compliance with various regulatory bodies. He’s also been fortunate to be at the forefront of new technologies and their adoption, such as blockchain, serverless and AI. Before that Markus has worked in industries such as venture capital and digital content and had his fair share of learnings from his own investments and stops and starts as an entrepreneur. Markus’ philosophy as an entrepreneur and team is that you have to learn faster than the challenges unfold. Markus has a background across Europe, Asia and now the US, first from the east coast and is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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About Prifina: Prifina is a venture-backed firm offering resources and infrastructure for developers to help them build apps that run on user-held data.
Nick Halsey
CEO of Okera
Nick joined Okera from Zoomdata where he served as President and CEO – rebuilding the organization, growing worldwide sales by 85%, and establishing distribution in a dozen countries. Prior to joining Zoomdata, Nick held leadership roles at Keynote Systems, SugarCRM and Jaspersoft. He contributed to the success of two IPOs and five other exits at various companies and is a limited partner in several VC funds. He has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.
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About Okera: Okera provides secure data access at scale so that data teams have the confidence to unlock the power of their data for innovation & growth
Ed Yu
Founder & CEO of StrongSalt
Ed Yu is the Founder at StrongSalt.
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About StrongSalt: StrongSalt is building a secure team communication application providing encrypted messaging, archiving, and search for innovative teams.
Yuriy Dybskiy
Founder & CEO of Puma Browser
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About Puma Browser: Puma is a mobile browser and wallet for the Web3 ecosystem. Private by design.
Pete Biggam
CEO of Blacksite.Solutions
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About Blacksite.Solutions, Founder Institute, HUBVERY: Blacksite Solutions, Inc. provides complete data security using zero trust polices and advaned threat detection and mitigation softwares.
Alice Rathjen
Co-Founder, CEO of DNA Compass
Health IT Entrepreneur Co-Founder, CEO DNA Compass http://www.dnacompass.com Advocate for consented patient-centric data , federated genome maps, security, privacy @dnatimes Example of reuse of mapping infrastructure for mapping and managing genomes at scale – https://www.dnabreast.com Slideshare – https://www.slideshare.net/dnatimes
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About DNA Compass: DNA Compass helps people meet up at locations on the genome to accelerate cures.
Casey Oppenheim
Co-Founder & CEO of Disconnect
Co-founder, CEO at Disconnect.
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About Disconnect: Disconnect makes the Internet better by giving people greater transparency and control over their personal information.
Talal G. Shamoon
Chief Executive Officer of Intertrust
Chief Executive Officer at Intertrust Technologies.
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About Intertrust, Intertrust: Intertrust is a software company providing trusted computing products and services to leading global corporations
Will Strafach
CEO of Guardian
Will Strafach is the founder and chief executive officer at Guardian.
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About Guardian, Verify.ly: Guardian protects and secures privacy and data while using apps and browsing the web on an iOS device.
Ray Gill
CEO / Founder of Peotic
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About Peotic: Everyone’s personal data cloud
Mark LeVell
CEO, Privacy & Marketing SAASSpecialist of 4Thought Marketing
2009 President 4Thought Marketing specializing in Visual Segmentation Software and Strategic Services as applied to Oracle-Eloqua, and the rest of an organization’s Marketing Stack Software. 2008 VP Sales of Market2Lead. Responsible for all revenue generation in the rapidly growing marketing automation space. Market2Lead was sold to Oracle in 2010. 2006-2007 Director, MarketFirst Product Line. Responsible for all aspects of the MarketFirst Marketing Automation Software Group for CDC/Pivotal Software. 1999-2005 Sales and Channel Executive positions for Pivotal CRM Software. Directly responsible for generating over 10 million dollars in revenue. Equally able to drill into deep technical issues with IT, while solving complex corporate business problems with political repercussions. 1998 Founder of PivotPoint, an integration middleware software company focused around Pivotal CRM Software. 1984-1997 President of TeLeVell Inc, Software Developer of the award winning TeleSell Sales System, the first ever CRM system on first DOS, then Windows. 1984 Established TeLeVell Inc, initially the first Novell Netware Dealer in California. TeLeVell went on to install Novell at over 300 companies throughout the Bay Area. 1983 Inventor of the “DPE” or Dial-up Port Expander. First device permitting multiple terminals to dial-in to a 3705 IBM Cluster Controller. 1982 Inventor of the Audio Disk Drive, the first multimedia add-on audio product bringing software-controlled recorded voice to the Apple II. Specialties: 20 Years of executive experience in the Marketing Automation and CRM software space. Management, Sales, Negotiation, Software Design, Strategic Marketing and Positioning.
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About 4Thought Marketing, 4Thought Marketing: 4Thought Marketing is an application development and privacy compliance services company founded in 2008.
Marty Greenlow
Chief Executive Officer of Ensighten
Ian’s impressive background and management expertise in digital marketing and advertising are fueling his success in driving adoption of Ensighten’s solutions worldwide. Ian started his career at Dun & Bradstreet Europe before working at Interpublic Group’s Draft Digital as Managing Director. After building his own premium publisher business, which was acquired by major US ad network Burst Media in 2010, he joined blinkx PLC as Managing Director of European Operations. Ian most recently served as Chief Commercial Officer of London-based VisualDNA, where he was responsible for worldwide revenue and business strategy across four business units.
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About Ensighten: The leader in website security & privacy compliance
Sam Mahdjoub
Founder & CEO of Limitlesslane
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About Limitlesslane, Logo-api: Limitlesslane is a password and digital life manager that enables its users to store and manage their passwords in a secure vault.