Cobalt, a provider of offensive security solutions, announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Sonali Shah, a longtime cybersecurity executive and current Cobalt board member, as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Shah’s appointment is effective as of August 28, 2024.
Shah succeeds Chris Manton-Jones, who has held the position since April, 2022. In the past 2 years, Cobalt has grown in the Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) space and expanded into offensive security, growing revenues and achieving profitability with an expanded customer base. Upon Shah’s appointment, Manton-Jones will step down as CEO.
Shah, a highly regarded strategic leader and product visionary with over 20 years of experience in scaling high-growth technology businesses, will further propel Cobalt’s growth.
Her deep expertise in cybersecurity includes pioneering the first cybersecurity risk rating platform, Bitsight Security Ratings, and driving the transformation of legacy application security technology at Veracode and Invicti to enable early and frequent testing of web applications and APIs. Additionally, Shah played a key strategic role in the successful sales of both Veracode and Invicti.
The appointment comes at a pivotal time for Cobalt. In the past year, the company successfully expanded its product suite to a full, comprehensive platform that enables everyone – from SMBs to enterprises – to scale offensive security testing across their entire organization.
This past quarter Cobalt saw a record-breaking number of pentests performed on its platform, outpacing any other quarter in company history. Cobalt has also received recognition for several leading industry awards including being named sole outperformer in GigaOm’s Radar for Penetration Testing as a Service two years in a row as well as being one of the fastest growing companies nationally four years running on the Inc. 5000 list.
“Sonali brings the right experience to this team. She has the strategic vision and deep domain expertise needed to lead Cobalt into its next phase of growth. Our entire board looks forward to working with her, and we thank Chris for his contributions to Cobalt,” said Gajan Rajanathan, Partner at Highland Europe.
In response to her appointment, Shah said, “Cobalt is uniquely positioned to help enterprises manage the risk of their expanding attack surfaces with efficient and continuous offensive security programs. I am excited to work with the great team at Cobalt in this effort and usher in the next phase of the company’s growth – one that will be achieved with a relentless focus on providing maximum value to customers as their offensive security needs continue to evolve.”
