Alastair PatersonFounder

United States - San Francisco, California

Alastair is a cyber security entrepreneur. He is currently CEO of Harmonic Security which he co-founded in 2023 to help enterprises accelerate the adoption of AI without worrying about the security and privacy of their sensitive data.

Prior to Harmonic, he co-founded cyber security innovator Digital Shadows in early 2011. Digital Shadows monitors the Internet to identify digital risks to organizations, including cyber threats, data leakage and reputational risks.

Prior to its acquisition for $160m by ReliaQuest in 2022, the company was recognised for innovation by 10 Downing Street, SWIFT and Cisco, was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2013 and worked with the Bank of England to define the new CBEST cyber threat standard. In 2015-17 Digital Shadows won several more innovation awards including the Europas, Momentum Partners, The Fintech50 2016, CDB Best Risk Management Product 2017, and was named a leader in the Forrester Wave on Digital Risk Management. Digital Shadows had offices in London, San Francisco and Dallas with over 500 tier-1 clients all over the world.

Alastair was named in Financial News'​ 40 most influential people in European FinTech in 2015, City AM's FinTech Power List 2015 and Computer Weekly's Rising Stars 2013. He has appeared live as an industry expert on the BBC, Bloomberg, CNN and CNBC amongst others and spoke at SXSW 2017.

Alastair received a first class MEng from the University of Bristol in Computer Science and has spent most of his career working with secure government and Fortune 1000 clients, specialising in cyber security, risk and intelligence programmes.

Before founding Digital Shadows, Alastair was International Propositions Manager at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, working principally with national security clients in Europe, the Gulf and Australasia.