ZeroNorth appoints Christian J. van den Branden as senior vice president of engineering
ZeroNorth announced the addition of Christian J. van den Branden as senior vice president of engineering.
As Senior Vice President of Engineering, van den Branden will lead ZeroNorth’s engineering and innovation strategy, managing product development and delivery. With the addition of van den Branden, ZeroNorth bolsters a proven leadership team that has led the company’s consistent growth and success in the market over the past year, while focusing on innovation.
In 2019, ZeroNorth experienced 300% ARR growth, and in March of 2020 the company raised a $10M Series A+ funding round, providing the resources required to build upon this traction.
“The proliferation of software development across all industries is happening at an incredible pace, which is both driving new levels of functionality and exposing organizations to risk like we have never before seen,” said ZeroNorth CEO, John Worrall.
“This ongoing challenge requires a consistent commitment to innovation capable of continually protecting against vulnerabilities that put critical applications at risk. The addition of Christian will help us ensure we keep pace with this challenge.
“His DevOps expertise and understanding of the problems businesses face will be an invaluable addition to the team as we continue to execute on behalf of our customers.”
Van den Branden comes to ZeroNorth with more than 20 years of engineering leadership experience, including an in depth knowledge of customer pain associated with driving security within a DevOps culture. Most recently, he served as Senior VP of Product at Digitial.ai.
Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at XebiaLabs, a leader in Enterprise DevOps and Application Release Automation. Before XebiaLabs, he served as VP of HyperConverged Infrastructure R&D at Hewlett Packard Enterprise following its acquisition of SimpliVity, where he was VP of Engineering.
Van den Branden joined SimpliVity in 2013 and oversaw the rapid growth of the company’s engineering team and led its agile transformation. He holds a M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and an MBA from Boston University.
“Organizations continue to face complexity and exorbitant costs associated with application security,” said van den Branden. “ZeroNorth is certainly addressing this challenge, which is evident by the success the company is having in the market.
“I am excited to join the team and hope to contribute to the company’s continued growth by working to develop innovative ways of efficiently protecting critical application assets.”