Poppy Gustafsson, the co-founder and chief govt of the British cybersecurity agency Darktrace, is to depart the corporate after its $5.3bn (£4.2bn) sale to the US non-public fairness enterprise Thoma Bravo.
Gustafsson, one of the vital well-known figures within the UK tech trade, based Darktrace in Cambridge in 2013 with backing from the late billionaire Mike Lynch’s Invoke Capital.
In April, Thoma Bravo, which walked away from earlier takeover talks in 2022, agreed a deal for the London-listed firm that had been thought-about by analysts to be undervalued by traders.
Gustafsson is to step down with speedy impact and can be changed by Jill Popelka, Darktrace’s chief working officer.
“Darktrace has been an enormous a part of my life and my identification for over a decade and I’m immensely pleased with every little thing now we have achieved in that point,” stated Gustafsson, who was awarded an OBE for companies to cybersecurity in 2019. “Now’s the fitting time at hand over the reins so Jill can lead Darktrace via its transition into non-public possession and past. I stay Darktrace’s primary fan.”
Like lots of Darktrace’s administration and key employees, Gustafsson, who co-founded the agency when she was 30, was a former worker at Lynch’s software program firm Autonomy.
Hewlett-Packard sued Lynch, alleging that he duped the US firm into overpaying when it struck an $11bn deal for Autonomy in 2011.
In 2018, Darktrace was subpoenaed by US authorities for details about Invoke, warning there was a threat of money-laundering claims if its backing cash included money generated by the Autonomy sale.
Gustafsson, whose favorite mode of transport is alleged to be a canary-coloured Vespa, floated Darktrace on the inventory change in 2021. Shares have risen greater than 70% over that interval.
Lynch and his spouse, Angela Bacares, held a 6.8% stake in Darktrace which was value £300m on the time of the sale.
The 59-year-old Lynch and 6 others died final month when a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily in a storm.
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Gustafsson grew up in Cambridgeshire, the place her father ran an agricultural gross sales enterprise and her mom was a journalist for Farmers Weekly.
After attending Hinchingbrooke secondary college – alumni embrace Oliver Cromwell and Samuel Pepys, and the Wolf Corridor writer, Hilary Mantel, was patron of its 450th anniversary – she took a maths diploma on the College of Sheffield, the place her first scholar job was constructing kitchen cupboards.
She then certified as an accountant at Deloitte earlier than working for Amadeus Capital, the enterprise capital firm run by Arm Holdings co-founder Hermann Hauser.
In 2009, she moved to Lynch’s Autonomy.
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