September 3rd, 2013 was the day VERA was born. It happened to be the day after Labor Day, and I remember it like yesterday: my co-founder and I bought veradocs.com for a whopping $7.95 on GoDaddy, and the rest is history. Our vision for VERA was powerful and compelling, and yet deceivingly simple: To fundamentally transform the way people protect and share information, no matter where it travels.
It’s a pivotal and exciting time to be at Vera. We just closed a record-setting quarter–expanding our customer footprint into the federal space–verifying our profound impact for our customers we serve around the world. From GE, Cisco, Nike and other major Fortune 500 customers, I couldn’t have imaged our path to today and I’m excited for what the future holds.
And yet, we’ve really only just begun to realize our full potential and purpose. After five amazing years since starting VERA with Prakash Linga, my co-founder and CTO, I’m announcing today that I’m transitioning my role as CEO to let someone that I have a great amount of trust and respect for to help propel VERA through its next phase of development and growth. Please join me in welcoming Carlos Delatorre as Vera’s new chief executive officer.
Today’s announcement marks the next step in the company’s journey and Carlos plays a huge part in our next chapter. I will be working alongside Carlos to help drive Vera’s mission in this next pivotal phase of growth. When it comes to finding your successor, I wanted the transition to be smooth, transparent and exciting for employees and customers. Carlos understands the compelling value VERA brings to the market, given the current and growing focus on data protection and privacy. Under his day-to-day leadership, I’m confident VERA will continue to innovate to allow organizations to collaborate freely and share information securely.
In that same breath, I’m also pleased to announce today’s strategic investment from BMW i Ventures led by the firms partner, Zach Barasz. BMW i Ventures has partnered with an impressive portfolio of innovative companies including Lime Scooters, Scoop, Carbon3D, JustPark and we’re honored to me the newest addition to their business portfolio.
At Vera, we’re building a profoundly different approach to data security, privacy and rights management, with a solution that’s both frictionless for the end-user and impenetrable to attackers. Propelled by our mission, I’m looking forward with this next chapter as we continue to strive for success and become the next great cybersecurity company.