New Venture CEO

We are supporting a confidential search for a New Venture CEO to lead a new, standalone data sovereignty venture within a founder-led technology ecosystem, focused on data sovereignty, privacy infrastructure, and secure cloud architecture. This is a founder-level mandate for a highly technical leader who can own the venture end-to-end. The ideal profile is not a manager-only CEO, but a builder: someone with deep software or engineering credibility who can lead technical direction while also fronting the business commercially with customers, partners, and investors.

Key Responsibilities

Venture Leadership
– Own the venture end-to-end as CEO
– Lead the overall build, direction, and development of the business
– Establish commercial credibility for the venture independently

Technical Ownership
– Lead product architecture and engineering direction
– Make core technical decisions across the data sovereignty, data-routing, and confidential-computing stack
– Work closely with the wider engineering bench supporting the venture

Commercial Strategy & Go-to-Market
– Shape the commercial strategy and go-to-market approach
– Translate the venture’s technical and trust-led proposition into a credible offering for enterprise, regulated industry, and government-linked environments
– Build the early customer pipeline and convert design partners

Investor & External Leadership
– Co-pitch with the founder to investors and strategic partners
– Represent the business credibly in customer, partner, and investor settings
– Help define the market narrative around the venture

Leadership Build-Out
– Stand up the leadership team over time across areas such as sales, partnerships, compliance/legal, and customer success
– Leverage shared internal resources during the early stages of the build

Regulatory & Market Framing
– Navigate the legal and regulatory framing of the venture with credible advisors
– Demonstrate fluency across relevant data sovereignty, privacy, and data residency themes

Candidate Profile & Key Requirements
– Deep software or engineering background, with the ability to lead technical direction
– Proven experience as a founder, CTO, VP Engineering, technical co-founder, or comparable senior technical leader
– Strong hands-on credibility in building and shipping real product
– Ability to lead commercially and represent the company externally
– Background in one or more of the following areas is strongly preferred: confidential computing, sovereign cloud, data residency, encryption, privacy technology
– Strong grounding in cloud-native, distributed systems, security, and cryptography
– Comfortable operating in ambiguity and in an early-stage, founder-led environment
– Prior 0-to-1 experience and investor exposure are strongly preferred
– Open to an equity-weighted environment
– Near-native English is essential