We are a group of security veterans with over a century of combined experience building products ranging from firewalls, SIEMs, intrusion detection systems, web threat detection and want to question why our efforts are still struggling to protect enterprises. The day we realized that most products are built on a foundational tenet of events instead of relationships that exist in the data, is the day we decided to start Kognos.
Rakesh Nair
CEO
20+ years building networking and security products
With over 20 years of experience in cyber security leadership, Rakesh Nair has deep expertise in building enterprise security products. Prior to founding Kognos, Rakesh served as the Head of Engineering for the NetWitness suite of products at RSA. In this role, he ran a global 150+ person team working to develop SIEM, NDR and EDR products and incubated the fusion of security telemetry. He joined RSA through its $250M+ acquisition of Silvertail, where he led the engineering team, pioneered AI in cyber security, and oversaw the product’s growth to an enterprise-ready offering generating over $20M in revenue. Before SilverTail, he held various management and leadership roles including Chief Architect of Security Products at Juniper Networks and Engineering roles at NetScreen Technologies and various companies in the networking/security space.
Erik Heuser
Chief Security Research Officer
12+ years of network management, IR and threat research
Erik Heuser brings over 20 years of experience in networking and security. Prior to Kognos, Erik served as a Senior Principal Engineering Technologist at RSA. He was both Lead Technical Analyst for Incident Response and Lead Security Researcher for FirstWatch, RSA’s advanced threat intelligence team. In these roles, he investigated both criminal organization and nation state intrusions into private and public organizations and is well known for discovering the King Slayer supply chain attacks. Additionally he was responsible for building advanced hunting content for Netwitness Endpoint and NDR products, as well as developed novel automated threat intelligence gathering methodologies patented by RSA.
Nitin Gugle
VP, Engineering
20+ years building networking and security products
Nitin Gugle has more than 20 years of experience in building products for the networking and security space. Before joining Kognos, he was Senior Principal at Sonicwall and was a vital part of Sonicwall’s virtual firewall VPN product. Nitin has also held various leadership positions at Juniper Networks on the WAN optimization and acceleration products. He came to Juniper through its acquisition of Peribit Networks, where he served as the founding engineer. Before working at Peribit Networks, he worked as a senior engineer at Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent.
Rahul Gopi
Chief Architect
20+ years building networking and security products
With 20+ years of networking and security experience, Rahul Gopi is an expert on building products in the space. Prior to joining Kognos, he was the Architect for the McAfee IDS/IDP product. He has also worked on security and networking products at Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and Nokia Inc. His expertise also lies in data science, machine learning, statistical data analysis, and various libraries, languages and tools in the space.
Kognos continuously monitors billions of relationships to detect suspicious behavior. Once detected, Kognos uses an AI powered inquiry engine to ask thousands of forensic questions per second to fully contextualize the attack and present the findings as complete attack campaigns, allowing the analyst to respond in real-time.
