CEO Howard Ting’s Resignation Comes as Data Protection Company Hits $1B Valuation

Data protection startup Cyberhaven promoted its chief product and development officer to interim chief executive just a month after achieving unicorn status.
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The San Jose, California-based company tapped Nishant Doshi to take over as interim CEO following the resignation of Howard Ting, who took Cyberhaven from a small DARPA-rooted research outfit of 18 people in June 2020 to a 220-person rising star with $250 million in outside funding and a $1 billion market cap. The CEO change comes just a month after Cyberhaven closed a $100 million Series D round.
“For years, I’ve walked a tightrope, balancing the all-consuming demands of being CEO at Cyberhaven with the deeply cherished responsibility of being the best father I could be to my three young children,” Ting wrote on LinkedIn Tuesday. “After much heartfelt deliberation, and knowing the immense sacrifices required of my role, I’ve decided to step down as CEO.”
How Cyberhaven Evolved Over the Course of Ting’s Tenure
Doshi joined Cyberhaven in August 2024 after serving on the founding team of two companies, both later sold. He served as chief technology officer for SaaS application security firm CirroSecure before its $15.3 million sale to Palo Alto Networks and then spent four-and-a-half years on Palo’s engineering team. He was then CEO of engineering productivity firm Propelo, which was sold to software delivery firm Harness (see: Cyberhaven’s $100M Raise Targets Gen AI, DSPM Capabilities).
Doshi said he and Ting collaborated closely over a three-month transition period to ensure a seamless handover. Ting will remain on Cyberhaven’s board of directors. Doshi said he plans to preserve Cyberhaven’s strategic direction and cultural integrity, and that “nothing changes but the title.” Doshi wasn’t immediately available for additional comment.
“Nothing changes but the title: our mission remains to give enterprises complete visibility and control over their most sensitive data,” Doshi wrote on LinkedIn Tuesday. “To our customers, investors, and incredible team, thank you for believing in us. The best is yet to come!”
When Ting joined Cyberhaven, the company was still in the glow of a DARPA Cybersecurity Challenge Victory, but its vision of autonomous data security through AI and data lineage was untested. Under his guidance, Cyberhaven developed a strong commercial engine, attracted venture capital and grew its team tenfold as the company found product-market fit around securing data in motion in real-time.
“When Howard joined Cyberhaven, the company was essentially a research lab – our founders had won a DARPA Cybersecurity Challenge,” Doshi wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Under Howard’s guidance, Cyberhaven transformed from that research foundation into the commercially successful, category-defining data security leader we are today.”
What Makes Cyberhaven’s Approach to Data Protection Different
Doshi said Cyberhaven embraces the reality that modern data flows are fragmented, fluid, and spread across endpoints, cloud systems and AI tools. The company’s core technology enables organizations to trace where data originates, how it moves, how it’s transformed, and who touches it, he said.
“My team and I worked tirelessly to elevate your data security and insider risk programs with our unique data lineage solution – the ‘flight recorder for your data,'” Ting wrote on LinkedIn. “Now, as we fuse the power of data lineage with AI, our unique and strategic value to you will only grow.”
Cyberhaven is actively expanding beyond its core data detection and response capabilities to include data security posture management and full-stack GenAI security tools, Ting told Information Security Media Group last month. With tools already in place to track data in motion, Ting said Cyberhaven’s goal is to create a unified architecture that protects data regardless of location or format.
“We think data security is going to consolidate rapidly,” Ting said last month. “It’s going to become more of a platform play. You can’t be a single product company in this market to really be successful. You’ve really got to deliver a portfolio of products in an integrated platform to address all of the use cases that customers are looking for.”
While Cyberhaven thrives in IP-intensive spaces like technology, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, its ambitions are now squarely aimed at the enterprise segment, especially in regulated and complex sectors. Under Ting’s guidance, the company began moving upmarket to address the increasing complexity of data security needs across industries like banking, healthcare, retail and energy.
“We are broadening out. We’re getting pulled into more and more of the broader verticals,” Ting told ISMG last month. “And then we’re also going upmarket. Historically, we probably were more in the mid-market and smaller enterprises was their sweet spot. But now, we’re getting a lot more in the larger enterprises. That’s how it’s evolved over the past couple of years.”