Board of Directors
In September 2022, Lane Bess, former Palo Alto Networks CEO and Zscaler COO, became the CEO of Deep Instinct. He is an early Deep Instinct investor and was its Executive Chair of the Board. Mr. Bess has spent over 30 years as an operational executive and successfully launched start-ups and grown medium-sized businesses to large scale. Between 2008 and 2011, Bess was CEO of Palo Alto Networks where he led the late fundraising and scaled the company from its early go-to-market to a revenue run rate exceeding $200 million on path to its IPO. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, he served as the EVP of Worldwide Sales and General Manager of publicly traded Trend Micro Inc. (Nikkei) – growing worldwide revenues to over $1 billion annually. He has extensive experience in building technology businesses in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Japan as well as other international regions. His considerable work in the security technology sector has made him a trusted advisor for many enterprise CIOs and CISOs.
Debby Hopkins is an Independent Board Member and an active advisor to early-stage companies. She is a member of the Board of Directors at Union Pacific, MarshMcLennan, Bridge Investment Group, Compass Digital SPAC and privately held cybersecurity company Deep Instinct.
Debby was founder and CEO of Citi Ventures based in Silicon Valley, and Citi’s first Chief Innovation Officer from 2008-2016. She joined Citi in 2003 as Head of Corporate Strategy and M&A. She was Chief Operations & Technology Officer from 2003-2005 and later a senior advisor to Citi’s Investment Bank.
Prior to Citi she served as Chief Financial Officer at The Boeing Company and Lucent Technologies. She was General Auditor at General Motors, VP of Finance at GM Europe in Zurich, and formerly Corporate Controller at Unisys. She started her career at Ford.
Debby holds honorary doctorate degrees from Westminster College and Walsh College and a B.A. in Accounting from Walsh College.
Mr Cheng is a Partner at Millennium Technology Value Partners, for which he leads the firm’s investments in PrecisionHawk, Blackmore Sensor & Analytics, Phantom AI, BigCommerce, and actively manages a number of portfolio companies.
Prior to Millennium, Cheng spent three years with Rho Ventures where he was a Senior Analyst. At Rho, Cheng focused on investments in Internet companies, software services and clean technology. He was involved with Rho’s investments in OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga), Precision Demand (acquired by AOL), SolarBridge (acquired by SunPower), ChargePoint, Vidyo and Enerkem.
Cheng graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in Economics from The Wharton School and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Systems Engineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Amit Mital served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director, National Security Council from 2021 to August 2022. He focused on strategy and policy for Cyber Security and Emerging Technologies, including Critical Infrastructure security, Telecom policy, Spectrum policy & 5G strategy, Quantum computing and AI.
Previously, he was CEO and Founder of Kernel Labs, a startup studio that creates technology companies in AI, computer vision and Cyber Security.
His prior role was EVP/GM and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Symantec Corporation. In his role as Chief Technology Officer, Amit Mital was responsible for driving the company's technology strategy. Amit was also the Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Emerging Endpoints Business that included Mobile and IoT.
Amit joined Symantec after 20 years with Microsoft, most recently as the Corporate Vice President for the Startup Business Group, where he was responsible for leading strategic product development along with identifying and executing new innovation opportunities. He holds 43 patents, and is an innovator in several technologies including machine learning and high-scale cloud services.
Amit holds a M.S. in Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.
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Richard Watts
Observer
Mr. Watts is Co-Head of Strategy, UK Small & Mid Cap Equities at Jupiter Asset Management. Watts has also served as UK mid-cap portfolio manager at Merian Global Investors and Equity Analyst at Orbis Investment Advisory and served as Senior Associate in the investment management division of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Watts has a degree in Mathematical Sciences.
