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CertiK Expands Senior Leadership Team with Technology Industry Heavyweights

By: CertiK via Business Wire

January 27, 2022 at 09:00 AM EST

Smart contract and blockchain security company bolsters senior leadership team with veterans of Microsoft, Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco and more to lead CertiK into its next phase of growth.

CertiK, the global leader in smart contract and blockchain security, today announces the appointment of three new members to its senior leadership team: Zhong (Kevin) Liu - Chief Product Officer (CPO), David Tarditi - Vice President (VP) of Engineering, and Monier Jalal - VP of Marketing. The new hires bring a combined 50+ years of experience in technology, covering the cybersecurity, blockchain, telecoms, and IoT markets to support the fast-growing company.

Kevin Liu is an experienced product and engineering leader, with over 20 years of global experience in the technology industry, with a focus on media and telecoms. Prior to CertiK, Kevin was a founding member of FreeWheel (a Comcast company) where he held various leadership positions, including VP of Product and VP of Engineering. He also served as General Manager, China, and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ads, at iflix. As CPO at CertiK, Kevin will be responsible for leading product strategy across the company, building the groundwork for initiatives in securing blockchain applications and providing insights for the community, project owners and other participants.

David Tarditi has decades of experience growing and leading engineering and research teams. Before joining CertiK, David spent 25 years at Microsoft, with his most recent role as a Principal Group Software Engineering Manager, leading the development of a secure IoT operating system. David has worked developing compilers, programming languages, operating systems, and security systems and is an expert at building software development tools for enabling secure software. David did pioneering work on typed intermediate languages, which allow the outputs of compilers to be verified. He is the creator of Checked C, an extension to C that allows more secure C code to be written. In his role at CertiK, David leads the strategy and development of the CertiK product roadmap, including tools for finding defects, verification, and monitoring of smart contracts. David is the inventor or co-inventor of 22 patents.

Monier Jalal has over 20 years of marketing leadership experience in the cybersecurity space. He has helped companies successfully market and launch products and driven the growth, acquisition and IPO for a number of high-growth cybersecurity startups. Most recently, he was head of marketing for Check Point Software Technologies, a cybersecurity company. Prior to Check Point Software Technologies, he worked for WhiteHat Security (acquired by NTT Security), Sift Security (acquired by Netskope), and Vyatta (Acquired by Brocade, later Broadcom). His experience also includes Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Fortinet. As VP of Marketing at CertiK, Monier is responsible for leading overall marketing strategy and execution for CertiK.

These new hire appointments follow a period of exponential growth at CertiK, who audited 117 projects in 2020 and 1,737 in 2021. In December 2021, the company announced an $80 million Series B2 funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to nearly $1 billion. The Series B2 funding round, led by Sequoia Capital and supported by additional existing investors, came just a few months after a $24 million Series B+ round in August 2021 and a $37 million Series B round.

“Over the past two years, the explosion in Decentralized Finance projects has transformed the blockchain sector into a major global industry. This trend has also thrust security into the limelight, and the number of blockchain projects seeking security auditing has increased accordingly,” said CertiK co-founder, Ronghui Gu. “CertiK has witnessed an explosion of growth in the last year – over 1,385% year on year between 2020 and 2021 – creating a demand for top industry talent to lead us through our next phase of the company. We’re looking forward to working with our experienced leadership team to help propel CertiK forward in the market and address the important issue of blockchain and smart contract security.”

Learn more about the CertiK team at certik.com/company/about/.

About CertiK

CertiK’s mission is to secure the cyber world. Starting with blockchain, CertiK applies cutting-edge innovations from academia into enterprise, enabling mission-critical applications to be built with security and correctness. Headquartered in New York City, CertiK was founded by computer science professors at Yale University and Columbia University. CertiK is backed by industry leaders, including Sequoia, Coatue Management, TigerGlobal, GLVentures (Hillhouse Capital’s venture arm), Binance, Coinbase Ventures, Lightspeed, and more. Learn more at www.certik.com.