Leadership

Rusty Cumpston

Chairman & CEO

Rusty is excited to lead RKVST having previously founded Swim.ai and Sensity Systems. Rusty brings a wealth of experience from many successful startups as CEO (XenSource, CloudShield), COO (ONI Systems), VP Engineering (Infinera) and also served on the Board of Directors at Secure Thingz Inc. Rusty graduated from the UNC-Chapel Hill and continues to actively support and work with the College of Arts and Sciences.

Krishna Anne

Co-Founder & President

Krishna co-founded RKVST to continue securing Connected Things. Krishna was CEO of Secure Thingz and led its acquisition by IAR Systems. Krishna has over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor and IP industry, holding senior engineering, marketing, and P&L responsibilities at startups and large public companies such as Rambus, Broadcom, AMD, and MIPS. Krishna started his career as a design engineer at DEC working on what would become StrongARM.

Jon Geater

Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer

Jon brings his deep expertise in cryptography, cybersecurity, and blockchains to RKVST. Jon held senior global technical roles at Thales e-Security, Trustonic, ARM, and nCipher where he built chip-to-cloud solutions for mobile, IoT, payments, and smart cities while managing large global teams and driving corporate strategy. Jon is a serial leader of open standards at board committee level having served GlobalPlatform, Trusted Computing Group, OASIS, and Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger. He currently serves as Chair of the Security and Trustworthiness Working Group in the Digital Twin Consortium.

Rob Brown

Co-Founder & VP Biz Dev

Rob co-founded RKVST having foreseen an unmet need to assure information sharing throughout technology supply chains. From marketing embedded hardware security for smart cards at ARM, trusted enclave software for mobiles at Trustonic, and consulting for Ping Identity on IoT, the biggest challenge for users is still knowing what risks are introduced when relying on someone else’s data. That’s a problem solved with RKVST. Rob has a BEng (Hons) in Electronic Engineering.

Mark Long

VP Finance

Mark is a commercial board level Finance Director with considerable experience working in a financial and commercial environment with particular focus on scaling SME’s to a trade sale. He has held a variety of senior financial positions at Samsung, APW Inc, Invensys Plc, NXP and Jennic and lately as CFO for technology startups Secure Thingz, Faradion and Additive Manufacturing Technologies. Mark is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and has a Bsc. (Hons) in Finance and Accounting.

John Hartley

VP Engineering

John brings over 21 years of experience in software development for secure applications at nCipher and Thales, with deep working knowledge of chip-to-cloud security. He has designed and implemented a wide array of cybersecurity products including HSMs and Key Management Services. He has led the transformation of agile teams to streamline product delivery. John holds a Bachelors’ degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from Sheffield University and is a qualified SAFe 4 Agillist.

Patrick Reilly

VP Sales

Patrick is a sales leader with a proven record spanning 30 years at high tech firms. He plans and executes go-to-market strategy, develops sales and support teams, and achieves growth plans, metrics, and partnerships that create sustainable business. He was VP of Sales for six companies with successful exits, having driven expansion and repeatability of sales at the following companies that were sold to Safenet (Cylink), SAIC (Cloudshield), Cisco (Broadware), Tyco (Proximex), Watchguard (Hexis) and Oracle (Talari).