Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK 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 United Kingdom based CEO’ operating in the Network Security space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
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 Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Paul Hunter
Chief of Staff to CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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About Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry technology company that enables customers to go further and faster.
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Andrew Martin
CEO of ControlPlane
Andrew is a co-founder at https://control-plane.io. He has a strong test-first engineering ethos gained architecting and deploying high-traffic web applications. Proficient in systems development, testing, and maintenance, he is comfortable profiling and securing every tier of a bare metal or cloud native application, and has battle-hardened experience delivering containerised solutions to enterprise clients.
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About ControlPlane: Cloud native consultancy, securing Kubernetes from supply-chain and runtime attacks with a zero trust, continuous security approach.
Jamie Akhtar
Co-founder, CEO of CyberSmart
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About CyberSmart: An automated end-to-end cyber security compliance platform that helps SMB’s.
Ashley Almanza
Chief Executive Officer of G4S
Extensive board and executive management experience and strong track record working across international borders in complex businesses. Held a number of senior executive roles at BG Group from 1993 to 2012, including Chief Financial Officer from 2002 to 2011 and Executive Vice President from 2009 to 2012. As Executive Vice President he was accountable during 2009 and 2010 for BG Group’s UK, European and Central Asian businesses. He also led a consortium of global companies through complex government negotiations in Central Asia. He holds an MBA from London Business School. Non-executive director of Schroders plc and Noble Corporation. Board member of the Ligue Internationale des Sociétés de Surveillance. He retires from the board of Schroders on 28 April 2016.
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About G4S: G4S is an international security solutions group, focused on BPO sectors where security and safety risks are considered a strategic threat.
Graham Levinsohn
Regional CEO, Europe and Middle East of G4S
Graham became Regional CEO, Europe in November 2013. Graham has more than 20 years’ experience in the security industry, having joined Securicor Cash Services in 1994 as general manager. Since then, Graham has held a number of commercial and line management positions in both the cash and security lines of the business. Graham was responsible for the creation of the UK cash centres outsourcing business in 2001 as managing director, before moving on to become divisional managing director for G4S Cash Services UK, and then regional president, Nordics. He became group strategy and development director in 2008 and joined the executive committee in 2010. Graham is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a director of COESS, ESTA and member of the Ligue Internationale des Sociétés de Surveillance.
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About G4S: G4S is an international security solutions group, focused on BPO sectors where security and safety risks are considered a strategic threat.
Jesus Rosano
Divisional CEO, Global Cash Solutions of G4S
Jesus joined G4S in March 2014 as Regional Business Development SVP to lead the implementation of new commercial structures and processes through G4S Latin America. In 2015 his responsibilities expanded to Chief Operations Officer adding to his commercial role the responsibility to implement restructures and efficiency programs in operations across the Latin American businesses including Cash, Manned Services and Technology businesses. Jesus was appointed Group Strategy and Commercial Director in January 2016. Jesus joined G4S from DHL, a logistics B2B global company, where he held various line, functional and regional roles in different markets in Latin America and North America over 11 years period. Before DHL Jesus worked in strategy consulting and investment banking with projects in diverse industries. Jesus holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering and Administration from ITESM University, Mexico.
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About G4S: G4S is an international security solutions group, focused on BPO sectors where security and safety risks are considered a strategic threat.
Oz Alashe
CEO & Founder of CybSafe
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About CybSafe, Royal United Services Institute, SPRITE+: A behavioural security and data analytics platform helps people make better security decisions, and improve their security behaviour.
James Hadley
CEO of Immersive Labs
James Hadley i the CEO of Immersive Labs.
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About Immersive Labs: Immersive Labs develops a platform that measures and improves cybersecurity skills across businesses.
Zia Hayat
Founder and CEO of Callsign
Zia is Chairman, CEO and founder of Callsign. With a PhD in Information Systems Security from the University of Southampton, he has served in various roles in the cybersecurity industry. From research engineer at BAE Systems to internet banking security architect at Lloyds Bank. Zia oversees the overall direction and strategy of the company while contributing to innovation and design of the service.
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About Callsign: Delivering digital trust through simple secure customer interactions
Freaky Clown
co-CEO and Co-Founder, Head of Ethical Hacking of Cygenta
FC is a well-known ethical hacker and social engineer. He has been working in the information security field for over 20 years and excels at circumventing access controls. He has held positions in his career such as Senior Penetration Tester as well as Head of Social Engineering and Physical Assessments for renowned security companies. Having worked as Head of Cyber Research for Raytheon Missile Systems, and working closely alongside intelligence agencies, he has cemented both his skillset and knowledge as well as help to steer governments take correct courses of action against national threats. As an ethical hacker and social engineer, FC ‘breaks into’ hundreds of banks, offices and government facilities in the UK and Europe. His work demonstrating weaknesses in physical, personnel and digital controls assists organisations to improve their security. He is motivated by a drive to make individuals, organisations and countries more secure and better-able to defend themselves from malicious attack. Now Co-Founder and Head of Ethical Hacking at Redacted Firm, he continues to perform valuable research into vulnerabilities. His client list involves major high-street banks in the UK and Europe, FTSE100 companies and multiple government agencies and security forces. He also co-founded the Surrey and Hampshire Hackspace as well as Defcon 441452 (Gloucester) hacker group. He has co-hosted many podcasts, been featured in the press and regularly writes articles for journals and blogs. FC and his partner Dr Jessica Barker have been announced as Guest Curators of the 2018 Cheltenham Science Festival. FC frequently gives talks at corporate events, security conferences, universities and schools around the world. He specialises in teaching people of all ages and abilities the art of security in an engaging and impactful way. He demystifies security with his expertise, humour and passion.
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About Cygenta: Cygenta support clients dealing with the multi-dimensional challenge of cyber-security.
Jessica Barker
Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Cygenta
Jessica Barker is a leader in the human nature of cybersecurity. She has been named one of the top 20 most influential women in cybersecurity in the UK and in 2017 she was awarded as one of the UK’s Tech Women 50. She is Co-Founder and co-CEO of Cygenta, where she follows her passion of positively influencing cybersecurity awareness, behaviours and culture in organisations around the world. She is a popular keynote speaker and regularly shares her expertise in the media, for example on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 News and in Grazia magazine and the Sunday Times. She is the Chair of ClubCISO and a board member of BlackHat Executive Summit Europe and SANS Security Awareness Summit EU.
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About Cygenta: Cygenta support clients dealing with the multi-dimensional challenge of cyber-security.
Muhammad Omar Khan
Co-Founder & CEO of SIRP
If there’s ever an issue, Omar is the man to fix it. Here at SIRP, he’s known as the master of solutions. Where others may grow frustrated in the face of a problem, Omar gets excited. He’s passionate about working through the complexities of any system, deciphering codes, identifying causes and effects, and pinpointing where things go wrong. After that, he uses his extreme technical skills to formulate ingenious solutions, ones that don’t merely patch things up, but provide ongoing, full-scale protection. Omar’s passion and skill has been cultivated for the past decade. He is a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP) certification. Omar previously worked for for Cyber Internet Services (Pvt.) Ltd, as one of their brightest System Security Engineers. He works closely with Faiz on the Honeynet Project and PAKCON. He specializes in information security management and best practices, intrusion detection systems, firewalls, honeynets, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. His programming experience is quite extensive, in C, C++, PHP, and C#. Omar is prized for his ability to direct diverse cyber security initiatives, provide in depth analysis of systems, and implement comprehensive solutions that meet the unique needs and goals of every business SIRP serve.
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About SIRP: Risk-Based Security Orchestration, Automation & Response (SOAR) Platform
Carmen Palacios-Berraquero
Co-Founder, Co-Inventor, and CEO of Nu Quantum
Carmen Palacios-Berraquero is the co-inventor of Nu Quantum technology and currently serves the company as Chief Executive Officer. Carmen is a national award-winning physicist and leader of pro-equality action in science and beyond.
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About Nu Quantum: Nu Quantum is a quantum networking start-up building the entanglement fabric essential to scaling quantum computers.
Jacques Declas
CEO of 42Crunch
Jacques Declas, founder and CEO of 42 Crunch, is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years in the Enterprise Software industry and a record of scaling international sales team. He has an extensive knowledge of the API Security market having served in senior VP roles in Forum Systems, Vordel (acquired by Axway) and Intel. During his career Jacques has built worldwide partnership with Software vendors such as Computer Associates, Oracle and Microsoft and leading consulting firms such as Accenture, Atos and CSC. Jacques holds a bachelor of Financial Management and European Business Law.
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About 42Crunch: 42Crunch is an API Security platform, addressing the development, testing, and deployment security requirements of API infrastructure.
Bruce Beckloff
co-founder and CEO of Bloc Ventures
Bruce is the CEO and co-founder of Bloc Ventures, targeting investment in early life-cycle companies focused on the emerging Industrial Internet market. Before this Bruce was with ARM Holdings for 12 years serving as head of Corporate Development responsible for corporate strategy development, M&A, and investments. Bloc Ventures Recently, Bruce has been assisting the UK government as a venture capital Strategic Adviser helping the UK’s high growth early stage companies access financing from venture providers.He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor and a Masters in materials science and holds a Masters in Business administration from the Southern Methodist University.
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About Bloc Ventures: Bloc Ventures is an early-stage Deep Tech investment company. Pitch to Bloc here: https://blocventures.com/pitching/
David Pollock
Founder & CEO of Chess ICT
David established Chess in 1993, one of the UK’s fastest growing companies, listed in the Sunday Times Fast/Tech Track 100 and in the 100 Best Companies to Work For the last eight years. In 2017 and 2016 Chess was named the 2nd in 100 Best Company to Work For, the 2014 European Business Awards Customer Focus Champions and the Institute of Customer Service Quality Service Provider of the Year 2011. Acquisitions play a big part in Chess’ growth having completed over 100 to date. Chess employ over 500 people throughout the UK serving over 30,000 business customers in the Information Communication Technology sector. In 2017 David was named Best Leader by The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For. He won the Ernst and Young UK Technology Entrepreneur of the Year 2007, Telecoms Industry Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 and Institute of Directors – Cheshire Director of the Year 2009, he was made a Deputy Lieutenant of Cheshire in 2012. His business career began at school promoting bands to his friends, moving on to music videos in Los Angeles, he has established many successful businesses from utilities, property, energy, organic food to online marketing. In his charitable work David, an active supporter of the Prince’s Trust, has been Chairman of the NW Development Committee since 2010. He enjoys physics challenges, In 2008 he led a team that won the Prince’s Trust Costa Rica Challenge, in 2009 his team came 2nd out of 42 teams in the Prince’s Trust Wild UK Challenge, in 2011 and 2012 his team won The Prince’s Trust Mersey to Tyne Challenge. In July 2012 he summited Mont Blanc and Kilimanjaro in July 2013. He is also a Trustee of Active Cheshire a charity that encourages health and well being through activity and is a Vice President of East Cheshire Hospice.
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About Chess ICT: Chess ICT provide services including product supply and installation, storage, hosted and cloud solutions.
Haydn Brooks
Co-Founder & CEO of Risk Ledger
Haydn graduated Imperial College London with a degree in Neuroscience and Mental Health. He then joined KPMG’s cyber security team where he specialised in supply chain security and social engineering. Haydn was one of the youngest graduates at a big 4 firm to set up, design, implement, and close, a number of third party assurance projects on behalf of a number of large clients. After a successful consulting career that spanned a number of years at KPMG, Deloitte, and a technology startup, he founded Risk Ledger. Risk Ledger solves the pain around third party assurance and security due diligence. Haydn hopes that Risk Ledger will mean that nobody ever has to experience the pain of running a manual third party assurance programme again.
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About Risk Ledger: Risk Ledger is the world’s most innovative vendor risk management platform, built on the model of a secure social network.
David Notley
CEO and Co-Founder of Enclave Networks
David Notley is the CEO of Enclave Network. He is a highly experienced Board level management consultant with a proven track record in management training, corporate strategy and finance and an expert in advising technology businesses. Following a career in international M&A and venture capital, David Notley founded and invested in a number of technology and professional services businesses. David currently advises high growth tech businesses and delivers Government sponsored support programmes.
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About Enclave Networks: Connect all your computers, servers, cloud instances and containers across any infrastructure with effortless Zero Trust Network Access.
James Campbell
CEO and Co-Founder of Cado Security Ltd
James Campbell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cado Security and has over 13 years of experience in helping global organizations tackle sophisticated cyber espionage and criminal campaigns. James has a deep passion for cyber incident response, forensics, and cyber crisis. His background includes a career in intelligence previously leading Australia’s National Incident Response capability as the Assistant Director of Operations at the Australian Signals Directorate. After moving to the UK in 2013 James started with PwC to help build and lead the Cyber Incident Response service. As a Director within the PwC cyber practice, he worked with his team on unveiling the APT10 Cloudhopper cyber espionage campaign, as well as helping many global organizations investigate, isolate, and mitigate significant compromises. James has previously spoken at various conferences, including cloudsec, crestcon, and the forensics Europe expo. James has also published papers on topics such as disruptive cyberattacks, and supply chain attacks and loves to stay active in the wider cybersecurity community.
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About Cado Security Ltd: Cado Security provides the cloud investigation platform that empowers security teams to respond to threats at cloud speed.
Nick Morris
Head Of Partnerships & CEO of CyLon
Nick is a Director at Epsilon Advisory Partners, before which he spent three years running a technology startup. Following the company’s launch in 2014 by HRH Prince Charles, Nick successfully secured partnerships with a number of globally market leading companies across the UK, Europe and USA. Nick also sits on the Trustee Board of two small charities.
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About CyLon: CyLon is the world’s leading cyber security accelerator and seed investment programme.
Daniel Ng
CEO of CyberOwl
Dan was Associate Director at KPMG, where he focused on the Defence, Security, and Industrial sectors. During that time, he worked extensively developing propositions, market entry and commercial strategies for global security, defense, technology and engineering companies such as Northrop Grumman, Atos, and BP. Dan is also Chair of a Working Group at the IoT Security Foundation, a non-profit working towards establishing principles and improving capability globally for IoT security.
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About CyberOwl: CyberOwl offers an early warning system for cyber attacks through real-time monitoring of high value targets for malicious behavior.
David Irvine
CEO of MaidSafe
David has in excess of 23 years experience in IT and 15 years running companies. He was previously responsible for Enterprise network design and project management and has worked on some of the world’s largest network projects. David is also a published author on papers in the fields of complex networking, distributed computing and cryptography related technologies. David enjoys sailing, engineering, camping and has a secret interest in intelligent robotics
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About MaidSafe: Building the SAFE Network: an open source P2P decentralized Web with privacy, security and freedom by default for all users.
Jeremy Hendy
CEO of Skurio
Jeremy Hendy serves as the Chief Executive Officer at Skurio. He brings Nujira considerable experience of semiconductor sales and marketing across multiple technologies for wireless communication and digital video. Previous positions include Marketing Director of wireless USB start-up Artimi, VP Marketing for Aspex Semiconductor, and Strategic Technology Director of Cadence’s Wireless and Multimedia business unit. He started his career with Texas Instruments and holds a first-class honors degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Liverpool.
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About Skurio: Skurio is a cybersecurity company that gives every organization the ability to reveal their spectrum of digital risk.
Vassilis Seferidis
Co-Founder & CEO of Zeetta Networks
Vassilis has more than 25 years of experience in the Telecom and Consumer Electronics (CE) industries mainly in Strategic Business Planning and Development roles. Before co-founding Zeetta Networks, Vassilis was VP of European Business Development for Samsung Electronics responsible for driving revenue growth and strategic development of the company’s Consumer Electronics business in Europe. Prior to Samsung, he held senior management positions with British Telecom, Toshiba Information Systems, Philips Electronics, and British Standards Institute. During 2006-2009 he was the CTO of QIO Systems Inc., a pioneer in wearable electronics based in New York City. Vassilis holds a BSc and MSc from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, a PhD in Electronic Systems Engineering from Essex University and an MBA from Cass Business School, University of London. In 2011 he was included in Euro50, a list of Europe’s 50 most influential people in Broadband &Telecoms industries.
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About Zeetta Networks: Zeetta Networks simplifies the monitoring, management and automation of complex ICT networks
Silvio Di Crosta
CEO of Domotz
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About Domotz: Remote Monitoring & Management in an IoT World.
Jeremy Gidlow
CEO & Co-Founder of Netacea
Jeremy is actively involved in Intechnica and splits his time between the general management of the business, designing client solutions, and leading consultancy projects for digital transformation and IT due diligence.
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About Intechnica, Netacea: Smarter Bot Management using Intent Analytics™ powered by machine learning. A sophisticated approach for sophisticated threats.
David Garfield
CEO of Garrison Technology
David Garfield is CEO at Garrison Technology.
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About Garrison Technology: Garrison Technology is a cybersecurity firm that offers a secure remote browsing technology.
Paul German
CEO of Certes Networks
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About Certes Networks: Certes Networks, Inc. provides security solutions for high performance networks for government agencies and federal organizations.
Alex Cowan
CEO of RazorSecure
Alex Cowan founded RazorSecure in 2015 following a career in the gaming industry where he was frustrated with gamers hacking both the games and the systems. Alex has developed a new approach to cyber for transport making it ideal for rail. His objective was to develop a system that did not require a permanent data connection, could protect itself and produced very low false positives. His gaming background means the RazorSecure solution is always one step ahead of the hackers. Alex has been highly successful in building the team, raising significant investment and positioning RazorSecure as the EU cyber solution for rail.
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About RazorSecure: RazorSecure is a cyber security software that provides continuous threat monitoring & active defence strategy for trains, buses, cars & etc.
Jim McCoy
Founder/CEO of Q-Branch Labs
Jim McCoy joined Q-Branch Labs as Founder/CEO in 2016.
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About Q-Branch Labs: Cybersecurity protection for remote and work from home employees
Peter Cox
Founder and CEO of UM Labs
Peter Cox is the CEO and Founder of UM Labs, a UK company specialising in security for Internet based VoIP and UC services. Peter Cox has 30 years of experience in networking and cyber security. Prior to founding UM Labs, Peter was the co-founder of a successful IP security developer who achieved the first event Common Criteria EAL4 certifications for a general purpose firewall and an email security system.
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About UM Labs: UM-Labs R&D provides Real-Time Communications Cyber Security UOS (Unicus) – protects all Data in Transit and Motion, running on any cloud.
Edouard Lavidalle
Co-founder & CEO of Stakin
Edouard Lavidalle is assionate about blockchain and Fintech. He believes in Proof-of-Stake as the most efficient public blockchain consensus mechanism. Edouard has been building blockchain projects for the past 4 years, co-founded Trakx, a Consensys backed startup, and operates PoS nodes since 2018.
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About Stakin: Stakin is an infrastructure operator for Proof-of-Stake (PoS) public blockchains networks.
