Query.AI appoints Dan Burns to board of directors
Query.AI announced the appointment of Optiv co-founder and former CEO Dan Burns to its board of directors. Burns, a business, technology, and cybersecurity industry veteran with nearly three decades of experience, joins Query.AI’s lead Seed investor, Jay Leek, managing partner at ClearSky Security and the former CISO of Blackstone, as an independent board member.
“The average enterprise today is using somewhere between 50 and 75 discrete cybersecurity solutions and technologies—some are in the cloud, some are on-prem, and some are hybrid. As a result, crucial data is everywhere, making it very difficult for organizations to access, investigate, and respond in a timely fashion,” said Burns. “The cybersecurity industry has gone through a long period of trying to centralize data to gain visibility. But, over the past several years through my work at Optiv and beyond, I’ve had many CISOs tell me that the current approach is just too expensive and resource intensive.”
Burns continued, “Query.AI offers a really innovative, browser-based product that overlays and serves as connective tissue for the full security estate so that organizations can see and act on their cybersecurity data, regardless of where it lives. I’m beyond excited to join the Query.AI board, and really looking forward to working closely with the team to accelerate the adoption of a platform that solves a huge cybersecurity industry problem.”
Burns co-founded Accuvant in 2002 to successfully execute his initial vision to build a company with the breadth, depth, and capabilities to address the information security needs of organizations worldwide. He launched the sales force and grew it to a national powerhouse organization within a 10-year period, conducting business with nearly half of the Fortune 500, and driving $740M in revenue.
In 2015, as CEO, Burns and Blackstone created Optiv with the merger of Accuvant and Fishnet Security with more than $2 billion in total revenues. Burns now serves on a select number of boards to help entrepreneurs and investors execute on their plans to create disruptive cybersecurity companies.
“Dan brings to Query.AI an extremely deep knowledge of the cybersecurity industry and landscape, decades of insights from solving complex customer problems, and valuable perspective from scaling a business from inception to enterprise,” said Dhiraj Sharan, CEO of Query.AI. “We are looking forward to working closely with Dan to enable organizations to accelerate cybersecurity investigations, save money, and amplify human potential.”
This strategic board appointment builds off of a strong first half for Query.AI, which included the company’s official launch, its $4.6 million Seed funding announcement, and being recognized as a 2021 Cool Vendor in Security Operations by Gartner.
The Query.AI approach to security operations is unique because it analyzes data in real-time from across systems, directly where it lives, eliminating the time-consuming need to pivot investigations from one security tool to the next.
The browser-based, patented platform automatically normalizes and enriches data, delivering meaningful insights to security analysts and SOC professionals in a single aggregated view that empowers companies to efficiently manage investigations and gain accelerated, high-confidence outcomes.