Seattle-based cybersecurity company ExtraHop named a new CEO, Patrick Dennis, an experienced technology and cybersecurity executive who lives in the Denver area, and announced the retirement of its previous CEO, Arif Kareem, after more than five years leading the company.
The announcement Tuesday morning comes six months after private equity firms Bain Capital and Crosspoint Capital completed their acquisition of ExtraHop in a deal valuing the company at $900 million.
Kareem had been ExtraHop’s CEO since 2016. He’s in his 70s, and the company described his retirement as part of a voluntary and planned transition following the private equity acquisition.
ExtraHop co-founders Jesse Rothstein, chief technology officer, and Raja Mukerji, chief customer officer, both remain at the company in their respective roles.
ExtraHop, which uses machine learning to help companies prevent, detect, and eliminate threats on their networks, also said Tuesday that its annual recurring revenue grew 47% in 2021 to nearly $140 million.
Factors included 54% growth of its Reveal(x) 360 software-as-a-service security offering, and 44% international growth in areas including Japan, Germany, Australia, and the Middle East, the company said.
“The number of companies that have metrics like this company is near zero,” Dennis said in an interview Monday, explaining some of the factors that drew him to the new role. He described ExtraHop’s total and adjacent addressable markets, annual recurring revenue, and customer retention rate as “truly unusual.”
Dennis likened ExtraHop to “a rocketship,” and said goals in the next phase of the company will include significantly increasing revenue via expanded sales and marketing, and further international growth.
The company has about 550 employees currently, and Dennis said he expects that number to grow “meaningfully” in the months and years ahead to help ExtraHop to achieve its ambitions.
Dennis, who is also chairman of Hayward, Calif.-based Ripcord, a machine learning and artificial intelligence startup, will continue to be based in Denver in the new role, but he said ExtraHop’s headquarters will remain in Seattle.
He was previously CEO of Alvaria Software, formed through the merger of Noble Systems and Aspect Software, where he had been CEO prior to the merger.
Dennis was an operating executive at Vector Capital from 2018 to 2021, and he said his experience in private equity was part of what drew him to work with Bain and Crosspoint in this new role. Prior to that, he was CEO at Guidance Software, which was acquired by OpenText in September 2017.
A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, he was an executive at companies including Oracle and EMC earlier in his career.