IPO Edge hosted a fireside chat from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with John Ackerly, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Virtru. Mr. Ackerly spoke to Editor-in-Chief John Jannarone about the problems Virtru is solving for businesses, its “data-centric” approach, predictions for the cybersecurity market this year and more. Watch the full interview below:
About Virtru
Virtru’s story starts in the U.S. government, with Will Ackerly working at the NSA and John Ackerly working in the White House.
Will Ackerly created the Trusted Data Format (TDF), an open and powerful data protection standard embraced by the intelligence community. John Ackerly was a White House policy advisor during 9/11. Both John and Will independently observed a key unmet need across government agencies: Data was stored in silos, and it was incredibly difficult to share securely.
Leveraging the TDF that Will created, John and Will set out to make powerful, simple data protection accessible to all.
Since its founding in 2011, Virtru has scaled up to empower over 7,000 customers to protect their most valuable asset, their data, with Zero-Trust security and powerful, granular policy controls that tie identity to data, everywhere it moves.
Virtru empowers commercial software developers to innovate on TDF using its cloud APIs for Zero Trust Data Control. Further, the company warmly welcomes community developers to build upon and contribute to the OpenTDF project.
About John Ackerly
As CEO and Co-Founder of Virtru, John is a long time privacy advocate. Prior to co-founding Virtru, John was an investor at Lindsay Goldberg LLC, working with entrepreneurs to dramatically scale their businesses. John also served as the lead technology policy advisor at the White House National Economic Council and was the Policy and Strategic Planning Director at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
John graduated from Williams College, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.