Cybersecurity Veteran Joe Lea Joins SecLytics as Chief Executive Officer
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San Diego, CA – March 05, 2025 — SecLytics, the predictive threat intelligence company, today announced the appointment of Joe Lea as Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and welcomed Loucif Kharouni as Vice President of Threat Research and Stephen Poeppe as Vice President of Solutions Architecture. In the CEO role, Lea will oversee the company’s operations and strategic growth, with a focus on scaling the platform and driving sales, marketing, and product innovation. By broadening its leadership team with its vice president (VP) hires, SecLytics is positioning itself to accelerate value delivery to customers.
Lea brings more than 25 years of executive, product, and cybersecurity experience to SecLytics. He joins on the heels of his CEO role at Kivera, where he oversaw the cloud security company’s market expansion and subsequent acquisition by Cloudflare. Prior to that, he was President of Shift5, the observability platform for onboard operational technology (OT), where he scaled the business as a product company through Series A and B financing rounds, and led Product for Armis, Inc., the leader in IoT security, helping drive its $4B valuation. Before that, he led Product at Tanium from a nascent endpoint query tool to a multi-billion dollar unified endpoint platform. Lea has built operating models that spawned portfolios of offerings spanning the fields of security and systems management, and has overseen award-winning product deliveries. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and ten patents.
“SecLytics is changing the ‘cat and mouse’ dynamic that drives cybersecurity operations and decision-making for so many organizations. Its track record is sterling – the team has proven their ability to defend businesses against destructive and costly cyberattacks before they happen, time and time again,” said Lea, CEO, SecLytics. “This company has a tremendous opportunity, and I’m eager to help bring it to fruition.”
Co-founder Saeed Abu-Nimeh who previously held the CEO title, will continue to serve the SecLytics executive team as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). “Joe’s track record of outpacing the competition and elevating companies above the noise of the busy cybersecurity space speaks for itself,” said Abu-Nimeh. “SecLytics is poised for fast-paced and aggressive growth and we warmly welcome Joe as we grow the business.”
Joining as SecLytics’ VP of Threat Research, Loucif Kharouni brings more than 18 years of experience enabling customers to identify and mitigate emergent cybersecurity risks. At SecLytics, he will oversee the strategic application of the company’s predictive threat intelligence model to the evolving threat landscape, to continue its 97% accuracy rate in proactively identifying malicious attack infrastructure. Prior to SecLytics, Kharouni was the Senior Director of Threat Management at ADP, where he built and led their threat intelligence, threat hunting, threat detection, and red team programs. Before that, he served as VP of Service Delivery at Deloitte, overseeing Threat Intelligence services and advisory. Kharouni also worked at Damballa, Inc. as a Senior Threat Research Lead and spent nearly a decade at Trend Micro as a Senior Threat Researcher, focusing primarily on threat actor attribution and malicious infrastructure analysis.
Stephen Poeppe will join as SecLytics’ Vice President of Solutions Architecture, where he will be responsible for shaping the company’s predictive threat intelligence platform, Augur, in alignment with the business vision and technical needs of customers. With more than 23 years of experience building teams and technologies to champion customer success, Poeppe was most recently Chief Customer Officer at AI Edge Labs where he drove the development and implementation of a customer-focused solution strategy. Prior to that, Poeppe was Senior Vice President of Solutions Strategy for Armis, where he helped customers discover, analyze, and control un-agentable devices. Prior to that, he held roles at Tanium, Intel Security, and was the Deputy Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Idaho.
By expanding its executive team, SecLytics is positioning itself to scale and advance platform development, enabling the company to further its mission to neutralize cybersecurity risks before they manifest.
ABOUT SECLYTICS
SecLytics is the leader in predictive threat intelligence, empowering organizations to stop cyberattacks before they happen. Trusted by global financial institutions, oil and gas, and energy companies, our AI-driven platform identifies emerging attack infrastructure months in advance—helping customers avoid disruptions, damages, and costly remediation. With cutting-edge behavioral modeling and an industry-leading 0.01% false positive rate, SecLytics delivers high-confidence threat predictions that enable proactive defense. Learn more at www.seclytics.com.
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