Dataminr Hires New President Brian Gumbel From Armis To Drive Channel, IPO Push

In an interview with CRN, the industry veteran says AI platform provider Dataminr is on track for $200 million in revenue and headed for an IPO.

Dataminr has poached an executive from another cybersecurity IPO candidate with the hire of industry veteran Brian Gumbel as its new president, the company told CRN exclusively.

Gumbel, who’d most recently served as president at Armis, joins AI platform provider Dataminr as COO in addition to taking the president role. He starts Thursday.

The hire comes as Dataminr is approaching $200 million in revenue, and “I believe this is a multibillion-dollar revenue company in the making,” Gumbel said in an interview with CRN. Customers include half of the Fortune 100, the company said.

Gumbel said his efforts to expand sales at Dataminr will include a strong focus on working with channel partners, including resellers along with providers of professional and managed security services. Among the goals will be to “revamp and relaunch our partner strategy and our partner model,” he said.

Dataminr’s AI platform offers the ability to discover events — including potential risks or threats — within publicly available data.

An increasing focus for the technology has been in the realm of cybersecurity, where Dataminr’s system enables AI-driven capabilities such as threat intelligence, prioritization of software vulnerabilities and detection of digital risks such as leaked credentials and phishing campaigns.

Major recent launches included the debut this month of Dataminr’s new generative AI capability, ReGenAI. The technology “automatically regenerates textual descriptions as events unfold,” the company said in its announcement.

Founded in 2009, Dataminr received a valuation of $4.1 billion in 2021 in connection with a $475 million funding round. In 2022, Dataminr named cybersecurity luminary Dave DeWalt as chair of its corporate market advisory board, while announcing a strategic partnership with security-focused investment firm NightDragon, where DeWalt is the founder and CEO.

Gumbel, meanwhile, most recently had been a top executive at asset management and security vendor Armis since 2020. He joined the company as CRO before being promoted to president in early 2023. Armis executives have told CRN that the company has been eyeing an initial public offering in coming years.

Earlier in his career, Gumbel served in roles including as senior vice president of worldwide sales at cybersecurity vendor Forescout. He was in that role at the time of Forescout’s IPO in 2017.

Prior positions for Gumbel included roles at Tanium, McAfee and Cisco.

At Dataminr, Gumbel’s responsibilities will include heading its go-to-market operations, sales and partnerships while also overseeing customer success and marketing. In terms of its revenue, growth and market opportunity, “the company is right in that sweet spot” for a future IPO, Gumbel said.

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Gumbel.

What prompted you to make this move to Dataminr?

I had an opportunity to sit down with the CEO of Dataminr, Ted Bailey, and it was one of those technologies that completely stopped me in my tracks. I had never seen anything quite like it in my career. And after speaking with them a few times and getting to understand the business, I knew this would be an absolutely incredible opportunity.

I'm here to help scale Dataminr’s go-to-market operations and sales and keep fueling their growth and momentum. I've done this before — at my last company [Armis], I was able to take the company from a fledgling cybersecurity startup, to now the No. 1 asset management company and close to achieving a run rate of $200 million in revenue. While Dataminr is also approaching $200 million in revenue, I believe this is a multibillion-dollar revenue company in the making.

What are the big opportunities Dataminr is finding in applying its technology to cybersecurity?

We believe that there's a huge convergence in physical security and cybersecurity. Within cyber we see four main areas in which we are going to cover. First is around digital risk intelligence — those are areas such as data breach alerts, preventing phishing campaigns, domain name and account impersonations, leaked credentials, fraud detection, those types of activities. The next pillar is third-party risk intelligence. And what you'll find there is our ability to prevent ransomware attacks on critical partners and customers, prevent data leaks and leaked credentials sold by threat actors, online impersonation and DDoS and website defacement, just to name a few.

Next, you've got vulnerability intelligence. And this is a space that has not been modernized in years. One of the things that we're going to be focusing on here is emerging and trending vulnerabilities, and ongoing exploitations, vulnerability disclosures and research. And also just making sure that servers and also industrial control systems are not exposed. The last pillar is around cyber-physical intelligence. We'll be able to look at physical threats to IT and OT infrastructures — looking at things like natural disasters, disruption and outages, warding off cyber warfare and other things that are happening within supply chain disruptions, etc.

What are you hoping to do with Dataminr in terms of working with channel partners?

Since I started my career I’ve always been a very channel partner-friendly sales leader. Dataminr has a huge opportunity for the channel. And I'm very excited to be able to revamp and relaunch our partner strategy and our partner model, starting with a few different areas. I would say that the first one is really focusing on the reseller community and those partners, to help Dataminr get us deeper into our existing customers, help us open doors in new prospects. But also for the reseller community, while this is the product that can be installed rather easily, there's a huge opportunity for professional services with the reseller community. So I'm very excited about that.

There are lots of product areas to grow into. We’ve got an incredible platform but with multiple modules, and we plan on releasing a couple modules each year moving forward. So this is a great way to land and expand the customer, and grow [with] a really strong partnership. On the MSSP side, there's also some massive opportunities for us to work with MSSPs to provide our services to customers.

Does Dataminr still have aspirations around going public?

Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why I was asked to join the team. I've had experience doing this in the past when I was with Forescout. And the company is right in that sweet spot [for an IPO]. We've got incredible growth. We've had a [large] revenue number and we've got predictable revenue, as well. And I believe when the market opens up and the timing is right, we'll have an opportunity to enter the public market.