CEO Today UK Awards 2021

Cybersecurity 1 24 CEO TODAY UNITED KINGDOM AWARDS 2021 Gustafsson CEO of Darktrace About Poppy Gustafsson Poppy is the CEO of Darktrace, which under her leadership has grown to 1,500 employees with over 40 offices around the world. Poppy has led Darktrace to achieve a variety of accolades, such as being named Europe’s 9th ‘Fastest Growing European Company’ by The Financial Times, as well as ‘Fastest Growing Super Scale-up’ by Tech Tour. Poppy is a qualified chartered accountant and previously served as the company’s CFO. She was the winner of the ‘Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Awards 2019,’ and recognized in Management Today’s ‘35 Women Under 35’ list in 2018, whose alumnae include Martha Lane Fox and Karen Blackett. Poppy was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2019 in recognition of her services to cyber security. Firm Profile Founded in 2013 by mathematicians and cyber experts from government intelligence backgrounds, Darktrace was the first company to apply AI to the challenge of cyber security. With its Immune System platform, Darktrace has fundamentally transformed the ability of organizations to defend their most critical assets in the face of rising cyber- threat. Darktrace’s pioneering technology leverages unsupervised machine learning to detect cyber-threats that signature-based, legacy systems cannot. It quickly became clear that the technology was powerful enough to identify a diverse range of threats at their earliest stages – from insider attacks to state-sponsored espionage. The technology works by learning a ‘pattern of life’ for every user and device in an organization. Continuously evolving its understanding of ‘normal’, it detects the subtle anomalies indicative of a cyber-threat. This marks a radical departure from legacy tools reliant on static rules and blacklists of previously encountered threats, which are therefore blind to novel and sophisticated attacks. In 2016, Darktrace’s leadership in AI was reinforced with the launch of the first-ever Autonomous Response technology, Darktrace Antigena. This innovation allowed the Immune System to react to in-progress cyber-attacks with surgical precision, giving security teams time they desperately need to catch up. WhenWannaCry ransomware attacks hit hundreds of organizations in 2017, Darktrace Antigena reacted in seconds, protecting customer networks from inestimable damage. The Darktrace Immune System is now used by over 4,700 companies to protect every corner of their digital environment, from cloud and SaaS applications, to IoT devices and endpoints, as well as industrial control systems and the corporate network. The technology provides complete coverage across major SaaS applications and cloud services, including Microsoft 365, Zoom, Slack, Okta, and many more, and integrates seamlessly with a range of security tools, from firewalls to various SIEMs and SOARs. Darktrace is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with more than 1,500 employees globally. ir.darktrace.com Poppy