New Hires Strengthen AI Capabilities, Product Strategy and Global Impact
Menlo Park, CA – Protegrity, taking its global leadership in data protection and privacy into AI Security, today announced new team members to support its significant goals across the entire spectrum of the company. With extensive backgrounds in AI, quantum, and cybersecurity, these new hires separate Protegrity from the rest of the pact.
“The difference between being an AI security company and being a fake AI security company comes down core competence, opportunity to explore new use cases, and most important, AI talent.” said Michael Howard, CEO of Protegrity. “With these new experts onboard, on top of our core competence in data security, plus working on bleeding edge use case, like semantic tokenization on Knowledge Graphs, we are ahead of the pack, with an audacious future before us.”
The new team additions are as follows:
Sameer Tiwari, Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Sameer is a veteran technology leader with 30 years of experience across distributed systems, big data, cloud, and large-scale databases. He has held senior roles at Meta, MariaDB, and Salesforce. At Protegrity, he brings a record of delivering resilient technology platforms at a global scale, combined with expertise in data governance and compliance. His ability to align complex technical architectures with evolving business and regulatory demands strengthens Protegrity’s GenAI infrastructure with trust, scalability and long-term resilience.
Saravana (SK) Krishnamurthy, Senior Vice President (SVP) of Product Management
SK is a seasoned product and technology leader with more than 30 years of experience building and scaling data-driven platforms across Big Data, AI/ML, databases, data security and cloud technologies. He has held senior product leadership roles at SkySQL, MariaDB, BlueData (acquired by HPE), Xplain.io (acquired by Cloudera) and Pivotal/Greenplum, as well as at Cisco and Sun Microsystems. Most recently, as Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at SkySQL, he led product strategy and go-to-market execution, driving 150% revenue growth and a successful acquisition by MariaDB. At Protegrity, SK leads Product Management and Documentation, aligning product strategy with customer needs to deliver secure, enterprise-ready GenAI solutions built on trust, privacy and scale.
Greg Stout, Vice President (VP) of AI Engineering
Greg is a technology and engineering leader with deep experience building SaaS, data, and AI-powered platforms across startups and enterprise environments. His background spans multiple industries, including fintech, professional edtech, healthcare, and privacy-centric enterprise technology. As a co-founder of VC-backed startups Illumeo and Proformative, he led engineering and product development for platforms that helped organizations deliver learning, insight, and engagement. Throughout his career, Greg has combined software architecture, platform engineering, applied AI, and customer-focused product leadership, with a strong record of building high-performing teams and delivering intuitive, award-winning user experiences. At Protegrity, Greg leads AI Engineering, applying his background in scalable systems and data-centric technologies to advance secure, enterprise-ready GenAI solutions that power privacy, protection and trust at scale.
Milan Chutake, VP of Engineering
A seasoned engineering executive with over 25 years of experience building and scaling technology organizations. Having held senior leadership roles at Yahoo and LinkedIn, she brings a proven track record of building high-performing global technology teams that deliver large-scale innovations across cloud, SaaS, personalization, and distributed infrastructure. At Protegrity, Milan will shape the technology roadmap and foster a data-driven, transparent, and accountable engineering culture that drives both business growth and responsible GenAI innovation.
Brandon Burge, Senior Director of Strategy and TechOps, and Chief of Staff to the CTO
Brandon is an IT and cybersecurity leader with 20+ years of experience in cloud operations, system architecture, and strategic planning. He has held positions at OVHcloud, Google, and Oracle. At Protegrity, he will play a pivotal role in driving operation excellence and security-first execution, helping scale GenAI-powered to meet the highest standards of trust and compliance.
Jessica Hammond, Senior Director Project Management, GenAI
Jessica is a founder and technology executive in B2B SaaS, agentic AI, and secure product development. She previously founded AIRLOC, served as Vice President of Product and Engineering at Clockwork, and was co-organizer of Data for AI. She has led teams in building transformative, autonomous AI systems and driving significant growth. At Protegrity, Jessica will leverage her established expertise in scaling B2B SaaS solutions, attaining SOC 2 compliance, and promoting responsible AI practices to ensure that new GenAI products are innovative while upholding privacy standards.
Averell Gatton, PhD (Physics), Director of GenAI
Averell, a machine learning engineer and former AMO physicist, brings a unique blend of advanced physics, scientific computing, and applied AI expertise. He has worked as a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at MariaDB and as an ML Engineer at MindsDB. Earlier in his career, he designed the MRCOFFEE endstation at Stanford’s Linac Coherent Light Source and led analysis of large-scale experimental datasets. At Protegrity, his technical depth in AI model development and optimization strengthens the company’s ability to design GenAI systems that are secure, accurate and privacy-aware from the ground up.
Auria Moore, Director of Digital Ecosystem
Founder of ClevrAI and product and marketing leader with more than 15 years of experience in SaaS, AI and enterprise organizations. She has guided high-growth start-ups global organizations, launching category defining products and leading digital transformations for Fortune 500 companies including The Home Depot, NASCAR, Best Buy and Costco. At Protegrity, she will connect innovation, platforms and partnership to grow a dynamic digital ecosystem that accelerates the company’s GenAI vision and global impact.
Luis Santos, Director of AI Privacy Engineering
Luis Santos is a senior AI and privacy engineering leader with a track record of building and scaling data-driven products. Currently Director of AI Privacy Engineering at Protegrity, he leads the strategy and implementation of privacy-by-design AI systems, combining regulatory compliance with technologies such as anonymization, synthetic data, and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). Previously, as Director of Artificial Intelligence and Head of Data Science at Celfocus, Luis led the development of scalable AI solutions and cross-functional teams delivering machine learning initiatives end-to-end. With experience spanning data science and business strategy, he brings technical depth, product thinking and leadership to help organizations deploy AI responsibly at scale.
Jake Henri, Senior Principal GenAI Security Engineer
Jake Henri is an AI security expert focused on helping organizations enable secure data access across AI ecosystems. Henri is an early adopter of AI and has closely tracked the impact of AI in the security space. He is a sought after thought leader in the Midwest, where he launched an AI meetup in Ann Arbor and consulted for a number of startups. Of note, Henri was formerly the CTO of Legalize. He later led the AI security team responsible for evaluating guardrail systems at Toyota, a role that put him at the forefront of AI security, guardrails and the challenges of protecting sensitive data. Henri is passionate about the challenges of managing AI risk at the enterprise level, especially given the limitations of today’s guardrail approaches.
Hardeep Bassi, Lead Machine Learning Engineer
Hardeep is a machine learning researcher focused on applying AI to complex systems. At Protegrity, he leads the development of advanced machine learning solutions that support secure and reliable data use, building practical approaches that help organizations better understand and manage sensitive information. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Merced. He brings experience from leading research institutions, combining a strong academic foundation with a focus on real-world impact.
Luís M. V. Seabra, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, GenAI
Luís is a machine learning engineer focused on building practical AI solutions for data protection. At Protegrity, he develops new AI-powered products from the ground up, including systems that help ensure AI is used safely by designing and implementing guardrail systems to enforce secure interactions, as well as agentic AI solutions that support enterprise data protection policy management. With a Ph.D. in Physics and a background in applied AI, he brings a strong foundation in turning complex technologies into reliable, real-world solutions that support secure and responsible data use.
Obinna Nwokonkwo, Lead Machine Learning Engineer
Obinna is a machine learning engineer and research scientist with experience in computational chemistry, materials science and data analysis. He has conducted research at Arizona State University, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Yale University and Southern University, focusing on electrochemical methods and the design of functional materials using quantum mechanical, statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics simulations. At Protegrity, Obinna serves as Lead Machine Learning Engineer, where he develops learning systems for data protection and applies AI methods to support secure data processing and privacy-focused workflows.
Arunima Sharma, Product Manager, GenAI
Arunima is a product manager with experience in AI systems, agentic security and access management. She founded Hello-EQ and NavHub AI, where she developed decision intelligence tools, and worked as an AI Security & IAM Product Manager at Salesforce, where she led AI-powered security and support initiatives. At Protegrity, Arunima serves as Product Manager, GenAI, where she builds AI agents and data protection systems that make enterprise AI verifiable, controllable and auditable.
These new recruits reflect Protegrity’s continued investment in building the right talent to support its next phase of growth across AI data protection and security. With deep expertise spanning AI, quantum, and cybersecurity, the team strengthens the company’s ability to develop practical, scalable solutions that help organizations use data more effectively and securely.
About Protegrity
At Protegrity, we provide data protection for AI and modern applications, securing sensitive data while enabling enterprises to unlock insights, accelerate innovation, and meet global compliance with confidence. From emerging AI to quantum threats, our flexible and forward-looking approach ensures data protection evolves as technology advances. With developer-friendly tools such as SDKs, APIs, and containerized services, we make it easy for teams to embed strong data protection into applications and workflows, securing innovation at scale.
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