Experienced Enterprise Security Leaders

Dr. Carsten Willems

Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Carsten Willems is a world-renowned cyber security expert and pioneer in the field of malware sandboxing. Carsten earned a master’s degree in computer science from RWTH Aachen University, and a Ph.D. in cyber security from Ruhr University Bochum. His academic work has been honored with multiple awards, and he continues to lecture on computer science at his former alma mater. Carsten also serves as a cyber security and digitization advisor to the federal state government of North Rhine-Westphalia (Beirat Digitale Wirtschaft Nordrhein-Westfalen).

Entrepreneurial by nature, Carsten founded his first company in 2007 when still at university, developing and taking to market CWSandbox, a radical new approach to malware detection. He successfully sold the company and subsequently engaged in several new ventures.

Today, Carsten is CEO of VMRay, a Germany-based cyber security company that offers industry-leading technologies for advanced threat protection. With Dr. Ralf Hund he co-founded VMRay in 2013, turning their academic research into solutions that help organizations protect themselves against sophisticated and targeted cyber attacks. Carsten led the company’s growth from early days to its present expansion into global markets, winning the support of leading VC investors, and successfully closing VMRay’s recent Series B funding round.

Read Carsten’s Blogs

Dr. Ralf Hund

Chief Technology Officer

Ralf achieved his Ph.D. in computer science / IT-security at the Ruhr-University of Bochum in 2013. During his studies, he focused on new analysis methods for software binaries, with a strong focus on malware. His findings were published and presented at many leading academic IT security conferences and received several awards for outstanding work. Furthermore, Ralf has been involved in the design and development of several sandbox technologies. He has experience in malware research for more than 10 years and is an active speaker at various academic and industrial conferences. His special interests lie in virtualization techniques and its application to software analysis.

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Ilijana Vavan

Chief Sales Officer

With 25 years of technology industry experience in sales, management and technical roles, Ilijana joined VMRay from Kaspersky where as Managing Director she lead its entire European business. Prior to Kaspersky, Ilijana was the Senior Sales Director at Oracle with responsibility for sales growth in Germany and Switzerland. She has also built and led high-performing sales teams at Kontron, Saba Software and Juniper Networks as well as Kaspersky Lab from 2010 – 2012 when she served as MD for Western Europe. Ilijana spent majority of her career at Microsoft where she held a variety of senior leadership positions including responsibility for the organization’s enterprise and partner strategy for Central & Eastern Europe. She graduated with a Master’s in Computer Science from the Technical University of Twente in the Netherlands. During her career she was rewarded with many prestigious Awards including Victress Cyber Award for Germany in 2019. Most recently she was named in Channel Partner Insight’s MOST INFLUENTIAL WOMEN IN THE EUROPEAN CHANNEL LIST.

René Kantehm

Chief Financial Officer

René brings more than 20 years of experience in managing financial strategy, controlling and accounting processes. In recent years he worked as a CFO for IT and E-Commerce companies. Previously René was investment director at WestLB, Düsseldorf. He has extensive finance an controlling experience. He holds an MBA from Suffolk University, Boston and University of Duesseldorf. As CFO he is responsible for all finance, controlling and operational activities.

Uriel Cohen

VP Products

With over a decade in cyber security, Uriel has become passionate about solving enterprise security challenges with technology innovations. Prior to joining VMRay, Uriel served as Director of Product Management for Ifasec GmbH, a German-based company bringing to market an adaptive network access control solution. Prior to that, Uriel was the Director of Products at WireX Systems, a network forensics company based in California and Israel. Prior to WireX, Uriel held a Technical Product Management role at Check Point Software Technologies, where he focused on building a successful roadmap for its FW-integrated Threat Prevention solution. Uriel holds a B.Sc with honors in mathematics from Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

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Christopher Martin

VP Customer Success

With over 20 years of experience in enterprise security, Chris is passionate about building strong technical know-how to tackle difficult tasks that security teams face while protecting their companies from threats. Prior to joining VMRay, Chris was in Product Management at Symantec, a leader in enterprise and consumer security products. He came to Symantec via the acquisition of Blue Coat Systems, where he served in diverse Systems Engineering roles including multiple years in a worldwide role focusing on some of the biggest enterprise customers across multiple industries. With his fluent knowledge of the security challenges customers are confronted with and his experience working on product roadmap, Chris is the perfect fit for leading our customer into a successful deployment of our products and services.