PLANO, TX – October 16, 2019 – Innovative MDR company expands executive team and names Andrew Kaufman to lead the finance department as Critical Start expands nationwide and enters hyper-growth phase – Critical Start, a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services, today announced the appointment of Andrew Kaufman as its first Chief Financial Officer. In this role, Kaufman will report to the company’s CEO, Rob Davis, and will oversee the finance team and management of all aspects of the company’s financial operations with a focus on driving efficient, profitable growth. The continued expansion of Critical Start’s senior management team comes as the company’s MDR business grew by more than 300% last year while maintaining a 99% customer retention rate.
Kaufman has an extensive background in software, technology and cybersecurity, including developing, streamlining and leading high-achieving finance and accounting organizations in diverse industries. Most recently, he served as CFO of STRAIT, a leading fund administration provider to private equity, hedge and real estate funds. Prior to that, Kaufman served as vice president of finance for Armor Defense, a cybersecurity service company during a period of accelerated growth and expansion. Earlier in his career, he held various accounting and financial roles at PeopleMatter, Blackbaud, Aprima Medical Software and Enterprise Holdings. Kaufman holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from the University of Missouri and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
“As we moved to take our regional business and scale it nationwide, our business strategy was based around growth investment, a nationwide channel partner program and an expanded senior leadership team,” said Rob Davis, CEO at Critical Start. “Today’s announcement shows we continue to execute our plan and we’re excited to have Andrew join the company so we can leverage his financial experience with other high-growth companies to maximize our MDR opportunity.”
“Based on my experience in cybersecurity, the expanding cybercrime underground and new techniques to launder money have created an increasingly complex and dynamic threat environment for enterprises, especially around ransomware. Critical Start is uniquely qualified to detect attacks and stop breaches by resolving every alert,” said Andrew Kaufman, CFO at Critical Start. “Already a profitable business, I look forward to working with the team to scale out our financial systems and processes as a platform to support our long-term growth.”
Critical Start’s MDR services are differentiated by the industry’s only cloud-based SOAR platform that resolves 99% of security events on its own by utilizing the intelligence from billions of alerts investigated and more than 20,000 playbooks, which lets SOC analysts focus their investigations on true issues, unknowns and anomalies. Using a transparent, mobile-first engagement model, Critical Start’s MDR services support a wide range of leading enterprise security technology partners, including Carbon Black, Cylance, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk, among others.
About Critical Start
Critical Start, the MDR experts that leave nothing to chance. Our mission is simple: detect threats and stop breaches by resolving every alert for our customers. We do this for enterprises through our award-winning portfolio of end-to-end security services, including MDR and Professional Services. Visit criticalstart.com for more information.
