News
03.01.2021

Former Cisco CEO Joins Virsec as Investor and Strategic Advisor Highlighting the Critical Need for Zero-Trust Workload Protection

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 1, 2021 Virsec, the industry leader in application-aware workload protection, announced today that John Chambers, former Executive Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems and current founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures, has joined Virsec as an investor and strategic advisor. In this role, Chambers will help advise the company as it expands the reach of its application-aware workload protection platform that detects and stops any and all attacks – known or unknown – at runtime.

“The need for innovative methods to secure critical infrastructure has never been greater as the scope, sophistication, and cost of security threats continue to evolve,” said Chambers. “The attack on SolarWinds marked a significant wake-up call for the industry – and, frankly, the world. Traditional and legacy solutions are simply not enough to protect organizations from the extremely advanced attacks we are seeing today. We are at an inflection point for the next shift in cybersecurity and Virsec is at the forefront of that by protecting application workloads at runtime. I am proud to welcome Virsec to the JC2 Ventures family because there is no other company that can fully protect modern enterprises and organizations the way this team can.”

Since JC2 Ventures was founded in 2018, Chambers has been focusing on helping disruptive startups from around the world build and scale. He invests in companies that are leading market transitions and promotes entrepreneurship, gender equality, and accelerating new business creation around the world. Prior to JC2 Ventures, Chambers spent more than 25 years with Cisco, serving as CEO, Chairman, and Executive Chairman. Chambers helped grow the company from $70 million when he joined in 1991, to $1.2 billion when he became CEO in 1995, to $47 billion when he stepped down as CEO in 2015.

“We are thrilled to have John’s support and endorsement of our mission,” said Dave Furneaux, CEO, Virsec. “We believe that as an industry, we can and should do better. It’s simply not acceptable to expect only partial security from our cybersecurity investments. With John’s active involvement, we intend to change the industry’s expectation with a shift toward precise and automated full protection. We want to put enterprises and governments back in control over their critical infrastructure.”

Learn more about Virsec and its focus on ensuring memory and runtime protection.

About John Chambers and JC2 Ventures

JC2 Ventures is a purpose-driven venture capital firm dedicated to helping disruptive startups from around the world grow and scale. JC2 works alongside CEOs and their teams, serving as true mentors of digital innovation. Founded by John Chambers, legendary Silicon Valley CEO who led Cisco Systems for more than 20 years, the JC2 team leverages their experiences to coach individual companies, helping them to see around corners, accelerate markets and create entirely new ones. JC2 Ventures is fully committed to developing startup companies in a Startup World, with a mission to better society by driving innovation, jobs, economic prosperity, gender diversity, inclusion, and success. Learn more at https://www.jc2ventures.com/.

About Virsec
Based in San Jose, Calif., Virsec is the leading provider of application-aware workload protection. Virsec’s unique technology defends against the widest range of attacks, both known and unknown, with no signature or prior knowledge required. The solution secures any and all critical business applications, from legacy to COTS to custom, in any environment. Virsec is led by industry veterans with extensive leadership experience at multiple leading cybersecurity and technology companies and a long list of high-growth startups. More information is available at www.virsec.com.

 

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Rhianna Daniels

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rhianna@compassintegrated.com