Armorblox Hires First Chief Security Officer and Expands Executive Team

Following a year of record growth, Armorblox is announcing a round of key executive appointments, including the company’s first Chief Security Officer. This follows a year in which Armorblox grew its customer base to 9,000+ organizations, raised a $30 million Series B round of investment, and grew headcount by 50%.

These cybersecurity leaders have helped build multiple billion dollar organizations like Netflix, Duo Security, and Lending Club.

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The appointments include:

• Brian Johnson, Chief Security Officer: Brian brings more than 20 years of experience in leadership, founding, and building to his role as Chief Security Officer at Armorblox. Previously, Brian was Co-founder and General Partner at Crucyble, CISO at Lending Club (LC), and has held leadership positions at Netflix (NFLX) and ForeScout (FSCT). Brian has helped design, build, and secure systems for the US Department of Defense, Global Finance, and Technology companies at scale. Brian has worked with Federal Agencies and Policy Advisors to influence actionable change in national security policy.
• Rob Fry, Chief Technology Officer: Rob Fry is an accomplished executive, architect, inventor, and public speaker with over 25 years of experience working with tech in an array of fields. In his current role as CTO for Armorblox, he gets to work on his passion for the cybersecurity space. Rob is best known for his contributions while working on the Cloud Security Team at Netflix where he was leading them on their move from data center operations to AWS. Prior to Netflix, Rob was Principal Architect at Yahoo, where he created configuration and automation frameworks in production environments.
• Jason Stutt, SVP Global Sales: Jason brings with him more than 20 years of sales leadership and strategy experience at global technology companies. Jason previously served as Duo Security’s VP Americas Sales, where he played a critical role in building up Duo as a unicorn in its marketplace. Jason grew annual sales from just a few million dollars to more than $75 million ARR over a period of three years, structured Duo’s sales operation for enterprise and Fortune 100 companies, and expanded its sales team from two to 65 employees, priming the company for its acquisition by Cisco Systems Inc. for $2.35 billion.
• Andrew McGuire, VP Pipeline: Andrew spent over 13 years building sales development, operations, and efficiency teams inside technology companies like Duo Security, Zendesk, and Salesforce.com. In his previous role, he built the pipeline strategy for Duo Security to grow from $10 million to over $100 million annual recurring revenue resulting in a $2.35 billion acquisition by Cisco Systems.
• Bryan O’Neil, VP Solutions Engineering: Bryan is an experienced Solutions Engineering leader with a background in building and scaling SE teams in cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS markets. Bryan was the first SE hired into Duo Security where he supported Duo’s hyper-growth over his 7-year journey. As Director of Enterprise Solutions Engineering, Bryan helped drive Duo’s acquisition by Cisco Systems in 2018 for $2.35 billion. Prior to Duo, he led Barracuda Networks expansion of their Content Security SE team as the first SE hired east of HQ in California.
• Mandy Legal, VP Legal: Mandy is an experienced legal team leader, with a passion for scaling highly effective teams while discovering innovative ways to support business goals and meet customer needs. Most recently, Mandy helped to build the legal team and function as Assistant General Counsel at Duo Security, leading the contracts function and team through the hyper growth phase to a successful $2.35 billion acquisition by Cisco Systems. Prior to her time at Duo, Mandy worked in-house at Rovi (subsequently merged with TiVo and now part of Xperi) where she supported metadata and SaaS licensing for a global sales function.

“I’m excited to be joining the Armorblox team,” said Brian Johnson. “I’ve seen many security vendors make simple things needlessly complex in my time as a security leader and practitioner. I’m delighted to find that Armorblox makes complex things simple, as attested by the many happy customers I’ve spoken with over the past several weeks. I look forward to helping Armorblox fulfill its mission of securing the human layer with the same clarity and simplicity in the years to come.”

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“Armorblox takes a materially different approach to protect communications with language-powered email and cloud office security,” said Rob Fry. “Since attacks have grown more targeted, the payloads have grown “softer”, often residing in the content and language of the email. I shy away from trying to apply ML & AI to everything, but I’m genuinely interested in applying them to problems they can actually solve. And natural language understanding (NLU) engines applied to email and other communication platforms are a good fit for extracting signals and vital context for these attacks, no matter how socially engineered.”

“Our vision is to be the Stripe for protecting business communications,” said DJ Sampath, co-founder and CEO, Armorblox. “Protecting emails is the first Armorblox foray into the market, and we’re proud to be securing over 9,000 organizations today against targeted attacks and data loss over email. But we know that organizational communication is not limited to email, and extends to file-sharing, messaging and collaboration, and other channels as well. The Armorblox vision is to connect to all of these channels over APIs, monitor business communications, and protect organizations against three types of adverse events – losing money, losing sensitive data like PII and PCI, and losing confidential information like intellectual property. We’ve been fortunate to bring on board a stellar team of executives and are looking forward to an amazing 2021 and beyond with this team!”