Leadership - Privitar

Senior Management

Our passionate and experienced leadership team is drawn from a range of industries and backgrounds who bring the best technology, go-to-market and customer success expertise to help organizations use their data more effectively.

Jason du Preez

Chief Executive Officer

As Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Jason is responsible for Privitar’s vision, strategy, culture, and funding. He is passionate about the benefits of data to society and Privitar’s vision of building a centre of excellence around privacy engineering products.

He is a serial entrepreneur who brings proven start-up and enterprise software experience to the business. Prior to founding Privitar he held global leadership roles across technology and data management at Thomson Reuters. Before that he co-founded and led the growth of data management software company, m35, up to a successful exit through sale to Thomson.

Jason has a Bachelor of Business Science degree from the University of Cape Town.

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Pat Walsh

Chief Marketing Officer

As Privitar’s Chief Marketing Officer, Pat Walsh leads the company’s global go-to-market strategy and initiatives including branding, demand generation, product marketing, and strategic communications.

Pat has more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, specializing in building strategies that have accelerated growth and created strong market positions for his previous companies. Based in Boston, Walsh joined Privitar from security management company Tufin, where he oversaw all marketing activities and helped bring the company public in 2019. Prior to Tufin, Walsh served as head of marketing at Core Security (acquired by Courion), and was the CMO of Talend, a leading big data and enterprise integration vendor. Earlier in his career, he ran marketing organizations at Progress Software, IONA Technologies, and Solid (acquired by IBM). Pat spent the first ten years of his career at HP.

He received his BA degree in Engineering and Economics and his Masters in Engineering Management from Dartmouth College.

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Kate Toumazi

Chief Operating Officer

As Chief Operating Officer, Kate is responsible for driving an execution focus across the organization and ensuring day-to-day operation of the business is efficient.

Prior to joining Privitar, Kate held several global leadership positions in businesses geared for transformation or growth at Thomson Reuters and has extensive experience in pricing and commercial strategy. She balances operational excellence with practical delivery and is passionate that the customer perspective is core to all initiatives.

Kate started her career qualifying as a UK Chartered Accountant in professional practice at Andersen. Kate has a BSc in Economics from the University of Nottingham.

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Steven Totman

Chief Strategy Officer

As Chief Strategy Officer, Steve is responsible for Privitar’s product strategy and development.

Steve has more than twenty years’ experience in large-scale data processing, running strategy, product and engineering teams, and building and designing data architectures with thousands of customers globally. Prior to joining Privitar, he served as Managing Director financial services at Cloudera. While there, he helped more than 500 financial services firms globally, including 82 of the top 100 banks, to monetize their data assets using Cloudera’s Data Platform. Before that, he ran strategy for Syncsort (now Precisely), a mainframe-to-Big Data company, and drove product strategy at IBM for both DataStage and InfoSphere Information Server after joining IBM through the Ascential acquisition. He architected IBM’s Infosphere product suite and led the design and creation of governance and metadata products such as Business Glossary and Metadata Workbench, now called IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog.

Steve holds several patents in data integration and metadata-related designs. He earned his Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science and Management Science from The University of Kent.

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David Gray

SVP of Sales, EMEA & APAC

As Privitar’s SVP Sales, EMEA & APAC, David is responsible for building and scaling the company’s sales, customer success, and sales enablement functions, and the partner ecosystem, in those regions. David has 30 years of experience in enterprise software sales and in the creation of client-focused teams to enable sustainable growth of the business. He has held sales and cross-functional leadership roles in the data space for over 20 years.

Based in London, David joined Privitar from Tamr where he led the international business. Previously, he held sales leadership positions for a number of high-growth, VC-backed, software companies including Birst, OpenPages, and Cartesis.

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Bill Ziske

SVP of Sales, North America

As Privitar’s SVP of Sales, North America, Bill is responsible for building and scaling the company’s sales, customer success, sales enablement, and partner ecosystems in that region.

Bill brings over 25 years of sales and sales leadership experience, previously serving as VP of Sales for software monitoring and testing company Eggplant, and Regional VP of Sales for Jive Software, a business communication and collaboration company. He specializes in building high-performing sales teams, focusing on the customer journey, driving adoption, and maximizing business value for customers.

Bill is based in Dallas, Texas, and received his BA degree in Business and Finance, and Masters of Business Administration from The University of Texas at San Antonio.

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Nicky Brocklehurst

VP of People

Nicky is responsible for Privitar’s overall people strategy, streamlining processes and scaling the function. Based in London, she has broad expertise across talent management and people operations gained at high-growth, global businesses including the BBC, Discovery Networks International, Betfair, and PaddyPower. Nicky joined Privitar in March 2020.

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Board of Directors

Jason du Preez

Chief Executive Officer

As Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Jason is responsible for Privitar’s vision, strategy, culture and funding. He is passionate about the benefits of data to society and Privitar’s vision of building a centre of excellence around privacy engineering products.

He is a serial entrepreneur who brings proven start-up and enterprise software experience to the business. Prior to founding Privitar he held global leadership roles across technology and data management at Thomson Reuters. Before that he co-founded and led the growth of data management software company, m35, up to a successful exit through sale to Thomson.

Jason has a Bachelor of Business Science degree from the University of Cape Town.

Find Jason on LinkedIn

Gerard Buggy

Board Director

Gerry has twenty years experience within information technology crossing a wide spectrum, specialising in real-time enterprise software and data architectures. Highlights include Tibco, California, Head of Revenue, NEON/IBM IPO, Thomson Reuters – Head of Data Division and Strategy at First Derivatives (AIM listed). Gerry has also founded three companies with successful exits through onward sale to Capco, First Derivatives and Sybase/SAP. Currently he is CTO at First Derivatives PLC.

Jean-Marc Patouillaud

Board Director

Jean-Marc is one of the two managing partners of Partech. He joined in 1996.

Prior to joining Partech, Jean-Marc was a partner at Finovelec, a Paris based venture capital firm, and managed Genèse Investissements, the first French seed capital fund. He started his career as an engineer with Cegelec and worked in the Nuclear Power Plant division.

Jean-Marc currently serves on the board of Acco, Alltricks, Dayuse, HappyTal, Novasparks, Sensee and Sigfox.

He has a long track record of successful exits including IPOs with Lannet (GIAN), RadVision (RVSN), ALLOT (ALLT), Buongiorno (BGN.MI), and Alvarion (ALVR) and trade sales with Fluxus (acq. by British Telecom), Digitick (acq. by Vivendi), ISDNet (acq. by Cable and Wireless), Jungo (acq. by NTS), Jobpartners (acq. by ORCL), Apogee (acq. by Colt) and LaFourchette (acq by TRIP).

Jean-Marc has been a director of Teads for the last 24 months prior to the acquisition by Altice (AMS: ATC). This was a critical time for the multi-continental expansion and the definition of the company value proposition.

He holds an MBA from HEC and an MS in Engineering from SUPELEC both in Paris-Saclay.

Martin Gibson

Board Director

Martin Gibson joined Accel in 2009 and is responsible for Accel’s investments in GoCardless, Catawiki, Carwow, Anyfin, Spreadshirt and Framer among others. Prior board memberships include Packlink (acquired by Stamps.com), Pillpack (acquired by Amazon), Ubiquisys (acquired by Cisco), Pontis (acquired by Amdocs), Space Ape (acquired by Supercell), Sansa Security (acquired by ARM), Dragonplay (acquired by Bally), TheCloud (acquired by BskyB), and Telepo (acquired by Aastra).

Prior to Accel, Martin was a partner at Atlas Ventures. Martin began his career as an engineer with startups Cellstack and Madge Networks, then as a general manager at Scientific Generics (now Sagentia).

Martin is from Scotland and graduated from Cambridge and Cranfield School of Management.

John Taysom

Board Director

John Taysom started the Reuters Venture Capital Fund in Palo Alto in 1995 making 82 investments in internet and web infrastructure and services including Verisign, UltraDNS, Digimarc, ZeroKnowledge and Intertrust. He was a member of the Board of Digimarc pre and post its Nasdaq IPO, a Board member at Intertrust and a Board member at TIBCO through its Nasdaq IPO. To date, seventeen of his investments have achieved an IPO. John acquired the Fund in an MBO in 2002. Now London-based with a seed portfolio of thirty US and UK start-ups; one has achieved an IPO and several have been acquired by Experian, Linkedin, Tesco, BMC and others.

In 2011 and 2012 John took a Fellowship at Harvard to work on privacy issues and holds EU and US patents on a method of improving privacy online. John is a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy and a Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, at UCL. He is a member of the Board of the Web Science Trust; chairs Performance Horizon, a fast growing UK startup; is a Governor at Hurstpierpoint College; and runs a small farm in Devon.

Cary J. Davis

Board Director

Cary J. Davis is based in New York, joined Warburg Pincus in 1994 and is responsible for Technology, Media and Telecommunications Group investments in the Software and Financial Technology sectors. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus, Mr. Davis was an Executive Assistant to Michael Dell at Dell Computer and a Consultant at McKinsey & Company. He is a Director of BitSight, Crowdstrike, Cyren, eSentire, RS Energy Group, Reorg and Varo Money. Mr. Davis is Chairman of the American Academy in Rome, a Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation and has been an adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, Chairman of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst and Chairman of the Boys Prep Charter School. Mr. Davis received a B.A. in Economics from Yale University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Lars Björk

Board Director

Lars Björk is former CEO of Qlik and is a member of the company’s board of directors. He oversaw the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2010 on the NASDAQ, which was recognized as one of the year’s top tech IPOs. Lars led the company and oversaw the acquisition of Qlik by Thomas Bravo in August 2016 for $3B. Since late 2017, Lars has been a “free agent” and serves on several start up boards as well as does seed investments in the tech space.

Lars is recognized as an authority on driving company culture through an accessible management style, with articles appearing in the New York Times, Forbes and Harvard Business Review, as well as speaking engagements at conferences including the CEO2CEO Leadership Summit. He was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology category and was named Technology CEO of the Year at the 2015 PACT Annual Enterprise Awards. More recently, he was nominated to participate in Startup America, a White House initiative to accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship, and the Clinton Global Initiative, an organization that brings together leaders to drive action on global challenges.

Before Qlik, Lars held several positions as CFO at companies such as ScandStick and Resurs Finance. He has a Degree in BA from the University of Lund, Sweden and a Degree in Engineering from Helsingborg.

Academic Advisors

George Danezis

Advisor

George Danezis is a Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science of University College London, and Head of the Information Security Research Group. He has been working on anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies (PET), and traffic analysis since 2000. He has previously been a researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium); and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he also completed his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. R.J. Anderson.

His theoretical contributions to the Privacy Technologies field include the established information theoretic and other probabilistic metrics for anonymity and pioneering the study of statistical attacks against anonymity systems. On the practical side he is one of the lead designers of the anonymous mail system Mixminion, as well as Minx, Sphinx, Drac and Hornet; he has worked on the traffic analysis of deployed protocols such as Tor.

His current research interests focus around secure communications, high-integrity systems to support privacy, smart grid privacy, peer-to-peer and social network security, as well as the application of machine learning techniques to security problems. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers on these topics in international conferences and journals.

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

Advisor

Yves-Alexandre is a postdoctoral researcher in computational privacy at Harvard IQSS. He received his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab. His research aims at understanding how the unicity of human behavior impacts the privacy of individuals–through re-identification or inference–in large-scale metadata datasets such as mobile phone, credit cards, or browsing data. Yves-Alexandre was recently named an Innovator under 35 for Belgium (TR35). His research has been published in Science and Nature SRep. and covered by the BBC, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, El Pais as well as in his TEDx talks. His work on the shortcomings of anonymization has appeared in reports of the World Economic Forum, United Nations, OECD, FTC, and the European Commission. Yves-Alexandre has worked for the Boston Consulting Group and acted as an expert for both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations.

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Privitar Leadership

Senior Management

Board of Directors

Academic Advisors