Meet the CyCognito Team

CyCognito was founded by veterans of national intelligence agencies who understand how attackers exploit blind spots and joined by experienced management from some of the most trusted cybersecurity companies.

Rob Gurzeev

CEO and Co-Founder

Rob Gurzeev, CEO and Co-Founder of CyCognito, has led the development of offensive security solutions for both the private sector and intelligence agencies.

Prior to founding CyCognito, he was Director of Offensive Security and head of R&D at C4 Security (acquired by Elbit Systems) and the CTO of the Product Department of the 8200 Israeli Intelligence Corps. Honors that he received as an Israel Defense Forces Officer included Award for Excellence, the Creative Thinking Award and the Source of Life Award.

Dima Potekhin

CTO and Co-Founder

Dima Potekhin, CTO and Co-Founder of CyCognito, is an expert in mass-scale data analysis and security. He is an autodidact who has been coding since the age of nine and holds four patents that include processes for large content delivery networks (CDNs) and internet-scale infrastructure.

Prior to founding CyCognito, he founded multiple companies, including Epicycle Technologies, a software consulting firm specializing in big data, computer vision, image processing, geographic information systems and other domains requiring huge scale and complex mathematical algorithms; and Metaqube, that developed a cutting edge city-scale augmented reality technology for mobile devices. As a Software Engineer and Security Researcher in the Israel Defense Forces, he participated in a project that received the prestigious Israel Defense Prize.

Oded Simon

SVP of Operations & General Manager of CyCognito Israel

Oded Simon, Senior Vice President of Operations, has deep experience supporting technology startups in their growth from formation through all stages of development, particularly in the areas of operations, fundraising and business development. Prior to joining CyCognito, he ran a business development and consultancy practice and was a Partner at Baratz & Company.

Ansh Patnaik

Chief Product Officer

Ansh Patnaik, Chief Product Officer, has over 20 years of cross functional experience in cybersecurity and data analytics. Most recently, Ansh was Director, Cloud Security Products for Google Cloud Platform, and Chief Product Officer for Chronicle, prior to the acquisition of Chronicle by Google. Previously, he was VP of Product Management at Oracle Cloud where he defined and launched their security analytics cloud service offering. Ansh has held product management, product marketing and sales engineering leadership roles at several market leading software companies including Delphix, ArcSight (acquired by HP), and BindView (acquired by Symantec).

Randy Streu

SVP of Global Channels and Alliances

Randy Streu, Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances, has more than 20 years of experience creating transformative partnerships in public and private companies to increase customer value and drive growth. Prior to CyCognito, Randy led strategic and technical alliances for SecurityScorecard, with a focus on corporate cybersecurity risk ratings partners, cyber insurance partners, and service providers. Previously, Randy managed business development and channel partnerships for Sauce Labs, Cloud Academy, Sumo Logic,and HPE Enterprise among others.

Jason Stewart

CRO

Jason Stewart has over 20 years of software sales leadership experience. Most recently he was Chief Business Officer (CBO) of Labelbox, a leading training data platform. He has also held sales leaderhip positions at Splunk, SignalFx (acquired by Splunk), Gainsight and Apptio.

Tim Matthews

CMO

Tim Matthews, CMO, has over 20 years of experience in software marketing. Most recently, Tim was CMO at HackerOne, the leading crowdsourced security platform. He has also held several marketing leadership positions in cybersecurity at Exabeam, Imperva, Symantec, PGP Corporation (acquired by Symantec) and RSA Security.

Sean Blenkhorn

Chief Customer Officer

Sean Blenkhorn, Chief Customer Officer at CyCognito, is responsible for the customer journey from pre-sales to post-sales. Sean has been in the cybersecurity industry for more than 20 years leading teams across GTM (go-to-market) including sales (sales engineering), customer experience, product, and consulting services. Most recently Sean led global Sales Engineering for Axonius and held multiple executive roles at eSentire as Chief Product Officer, Field CTO, and VP, Sales Engineering. Prior to his work in the vendor space, Sean spent nearly a decade consulting with Fortune 100/500 companies, helping to establish and build highly successful cybersecurity programs and the integration of core technologies such as endpoint security, encryption, data loss prevention (DLP), and security information and event management (SIEM).

Ayelet Senderovits Shapiro

Global VP of People

Ayelet brings to CyCognito significant experience as leader of cross-border People orgs, working with global executives and employees teams and supporting companies’ scale and growth.

Ayelet holds a master's degree in Organizational Psychology. She began her career journey in big corporations such as Applied Materials, Amdocs and Nice, later transitioned to medium-sized companies like Qognify and Zerto and most recently insoundz.

Ayelet thrives in the fast-paced environment, relishing the flexibility and creativity that small, young organizations offer.

Shlomi Oren

SVP Engineering

Shlomi Oren, SVP Engineering, has over 20 years of experience in Engineering leadership roles, over 10 of them in executive positions. Prior to joining CyCognito, as the SVP of Engineering at Zerto (acquired by HPE) he participated in the rapid growth of Zerto's disaster-recovery enterprise solution. As the EVP of Engineering in Otonomo, Shlomi led the development of the company's leading vehicle location big-data platform.