Michael is a serial entrepreneur that is passionate about technology, cybersecurity and leadership. Prior to CardinalOps, Michael co-founded LightCyber, a pioneer in behavioral attack detection acquired by Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW) in 2017 where he served as Vice President of Engineering for the Cortex XDR platform. Prior to founding his three startups, Michael served in various cybersecurity roles in an elite intelligence division of the Israel Defense Forces.
Yair is a 20-year technology veteran with experience at both early stage startups and large corporations. Prior to CardinalOps, Yair co-founded and served as CTO of Netonomy, an IoT Cybersecurity startup acquired by Allot Communications (NSDQ: ALLT) in 2018. Previously he built and led the engineering organization at Zerto, where the product grew to $100MM+ in annual revenues. Earlier in his career, Yair served in cybersecurity positions in an elite unit of the IDF intelligence corps. He holds a BSc in electrical engineering from the Technion, IIT, and an MBA from Tel-Aviv university.
As CRO of CardinalOps, Todd is responsible for setting the strategic vision to meet and exceed the revenue goals set by the CEO and the Board of Directors. Todd has led both early round teams to initial success and later round teams as they integrated into larger firms, having been a sales leader at Q1 Labs / IBM, BitSight, Venminder, ZeroFox, and Mission Secure. Todd has a BS from the United States Air Force Academy and served as a Colonel in the United States Air Force.
Phil Neray is VP of Cyber Defense Strategy at CardinalOps. With 20+ years of cybersecurity experience, Phil comes to CardinalOps from Microsoft Security, which he joined after the acquisition of CyberX, an early innovator in IoT/OT security monitoring. He previously held executive roles at IBM Security/Q1 Labs, Guardium (acquired by IBM), Veracode, and Symantec. Phil has a BSEE from McGill University, is certified in cloud security (CCSK), and has a black belt in American Jiu-Jitsu.
Rony Kaufman is the Director of Global HR at CardinalOps. Before joining CardinalOps, she was the head of Global HR at LocusView, a software company headquartered in Israel. Her previous experience includes being an organizational consultant and tour guide for various organizations in Israel. Rony started her career as a Training Officer in the IDF and holds a Master's in Organizational Consulting from The College of Management Academic Studies and a Bachelor's in Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy from Reichman University (IDC Herzliya).
Dr. Anton Chuvakin is a leader of the security solution strategy at Google Cloud, where he arrived via Chronicle Security (an Alphabet company) acquisition in July 2019.
Until June 2019, Dr. Anton Chuvakin was a Research VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) Security and Risk Management Strategies (SRMS) team. At Gartner he covered a broad range of security operations and detection and response topics, and is credited with inventing the term "EDR."
He is a recognized security expert in the field of SIEM, log management and PCI DSS compliance. He is an author of books "Security Warrior", "PCI Compliance", "Logging and Log Management" and a contributor to "Know Your Enemy II", "Information Security Management Handbook" and others. Anton has published dozens of papers on log management, SIEM, correlation, security data analysis, PCI DSS, honeypots, etc. His blog securitywarrior.org was one of the most popular in the industry.
In addition, Anton taught classes (including his own SANS SEC434 class on log management) and presented at many security conferences across the world; he recently addressed audiences in United States, UK, Singapore, Spain, Russia and other countries. He worked on emerging security standards and served on the advisory boards of several security start-ups.
Randy Watkins is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for CRITICALSTART and an emerging thought-leader in the security industry. As CTO, Randy is responsible for designing and executing the company’s strategic technology initiatives, which includes defining the strategy and direction of CRITICALSTART’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services delivered by the Zero-Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP).
Previously, Randy served as CRITICALSTART’s Director of Security Architecture, where he set the strategy for emerging vendor technologies, created the Defendable Network reference architecture, and set product direction for the company’s internally-developed Security Orchestration Automation and Response platform. Watkins was employee number five when he joined CRITICALSTART in 2012.
Ken Tidwell has been involved with software startups for 40 years. He has been everything from a lowly intern to president. Most notably, Ken was the chief architect at ArcSight when the concept of a SIEM was first developed and contributed many of the ideas still found in SIEMs two decades later. He also led the ArcSight content team and was head of the correlation team, where he built the rule engine, report generation engine, and dashboards. The ArcSight correlation team built the first high-speed, high-throughput, time sequence-oriented rules engine. The team also built innovative engines for report generation – dealing with the automatic creation of long term aggregates to assist with periodic reporting – and a dashboard engine. The team also developed the first pattern discovery engine for security event streams.
Most recently, Ken co-founded FactorChain to build tools to assist in incident response and investigation. FactorChain was acquired by Sumo Logic, where Ken assisted in developing security analytics for their SIEM offering.
Other roles have included being head of user interface for one of the first commercial object-oriented AI development environments, and building the first instance of a Java-based micro-service architecture.
Joey Johnson is a globally established leader in the healthcare & cybersecurity communities, with twenty years of experience in the field. He has been serving as the Chief Information Security Officer at Premise Health for ten years delivering healthcare to the Fortune 10-2000 and similar enterprise organizations. In that time, he has grown the private equity Premise Health from a ~$50M annual revenue organization 12x, now grossing nearly $1B annual revenue, and has guided the organization through multiple recapitalizations, mergers, and strategic acquisitions. Aside from IT and cybersecurity leadership he has helped to establish and drive the culture of the organization resulting in a company that has received Tennessee Top Place to Work top honors four years in a row. Joey has been recognized as a 'CISO of the Year' multiple times at city, state, regional (SE US), and national levels. He currently serves as an advisor for CISO Executive Network, the National Healthcare Information Sharing & Analysis Center (H-ISAC), the Cybersecurity Collaborative Corporate Leadership Council, UCLA Global Cyber Institute, the Journal of Law & Cyberwarfare, amongst others.
Dan Burns, Co-founder & former CEO of Optiv, has more than 28 years of business, technology and cyber security industry expertise. Burns co-founded Accuvant in 2002 to successfully execute on his initial vision to build a company with the breadth, depth and capabilities to address the information security needs of organizations worldwide. He launched the sales force and grew it to a national powerhouse organization within a 10-year period, conducting business with nearly half of the Fortune 500, and driving $740M in revenue. In 2015, as CEO, Burns and Blackstone created Optiv with the merger of Accuvant and Fishnet Security with over $2B in total revenues. He now serves a select number of boards to help entrepreneurs and investors execute on their plans to create disruptive cyber security companies.
Dharmesh joined Battery Ventures in 2015 to focus on early-venture and growth-equity investments in areas including cloud infrastructure, big data, security and next-generation enterprise applications.
Prior to Battery, Dharmesh was a managing director at Intel Capital, where he led the firm’s global cloud and big-data practice and made early- and later-stage investments in companies globally.
Before joining Intel Capital, Dharmesh spent almost a decade in product management and go-to-market roles with enterprise-software companies like Keynote Systems and Manhattan Associates. In 2016, Dharmesh was named to the Forbes Midas Brink list of up-and-coming venture capitalists, and in 2018 he was included on Business Insider’s 23 Top Venture Capitalists in Enterprise Tech list. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a BS in electrical engineering, Dharmesh also holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
He is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch, and has a regular column in Forbes.
For over 25 years Arik has been founding, growing and financing innovative technology companies. He co-founded Glilot Capital with the intention of bringing his vast experience gained from the early days of the Israeli startup industry to the investment decisions and ongoing support of the Glilot portfolio. As a board member, Arik supported the ten portfolio companies of Glilot which were acquired since the fund’s inception.
Arik served as an Officer and Engineer in an Elite IDF technology unit, and holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering & Management from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA in Finance & Technology Management from Tel Aviv University’s Kellogg-Recanati School of Management. Arik is a board member of IATI (Israel Advanced Technology Industries) and of the Technion Friends Society.
Kobi, a serial entrepreneur at heart with over twenty-five years of experience in various technology and investment fields, co-founded Glilot Capital Partners in 2011. Kobi’s vision for Glilot was to provide an environment for a solid partnership and investment model between entrepreneurs and investors.
Kobi brings his previous experience in building businesses and effective execution to his role in Glilot’s portfolio. His contributions have resulted in ten exits and a strong portfolio.
Prior to founding Glilot, Kobi founded and successfully exited several technology companies including Lamda Communication Networks (acquired by NICE Systems) and iWeb Technologies (acquired by a Japanese consortium). He was a member of the founding team of Infogear Technologies, the creator of the original iPhone (acquired by Cisco). Kobi served as an Officer in 8200 unit, an Elite IDF technology unit.
Kobi holds a B.Sc. (Cum Laude) in Computer Science from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA (Magna Cum Laude) in Finance & Technology from Tel Aviv University.
Daniel Cohen is a General Partner at Viola Ventures. He has been at the fund since 2013 and his investments lie in everything B2C, including Consumer Internet, e-Commerce, DTC, Games and Digital Media.
He currently serves on the board of EX.CO, Puls, Splacer, Deep, Lightricks, Maapilim, and Ruti. He was also on the board of Tapingo (acquired by Grubhub for $150M) and Origami Logic (acquired by Intuit).
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Daniel joined Viola Ventures after 11 years at Gemini Israel Ventures. At Gemini he invested in various companies including Adap.tv (acquired by AOL for $450M), Outbrain, Watchdox (acquired by Blackberry for ~$100M), and Minute Media.
Daniel began his career as a developer and product manager in a few Israeli high-tech companies, including Commtouch and Scitex. He has a BA in computer science and psychology from Tel-Aviv University and an MBA from INSEAD.
