Doppel Expands Executive Leadership Team, Welcoming Bobby Ford as Chief Strategy and Experience Officer, Amongst Other Key Executive Hires

Business Wire

01-07-2025

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Doppel, the AI-powered social engineering defense platform, has hired experienced Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Bobby Ford, to serve as Chief Strategy and Experience Officer. In addition, further expanding its executive bench, Doppel welcomes Alex Hu as Vice President (VP) of Finance and Alyssa Smrekar as Senior Vice President (SVP) of Marketing.
"My Co-Founder, Rahul Madduluri, and I are thrilled to welcome Alex, Alyssa and Bobby to our executive leadership team at Doppel,' said Kevin Tian, CEO of Doppel. 'Their expertise in finance, marketing and cybersecurity is invaluable as we focus on delivering more value to our customers, push the frontier of technology and execute on our ambitious plans. We've built the best executive team in cybersecurity, and they will help drive our culture of customer obsession and relentless innovation."
Ford brings nearly three decades of experience protecting some of the world's most complex and operationally intensive enterprises. His career began in the military as a founding member of the Pentagon Computer Incident Response Team, and he's since served as the first CISO at Abbott Labs, CISO for Unilever and most recently SVP and Chief Security Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Known for his collaborative style and empathetic leadership, Ford fosters an inclusive culture that empowers security organizations to excel. At Doppel, Ford will ensure an exceptional customer experience, be an industry advocate and deliver thought leadership as the company delivers on its mission to protect brands, executives and consumers from adaptive, AI-assisted social engineering threats.
'Joining Doppel is an incredibly compelling opportunity as we are creating an entirely new category with an unmatched social engineering defense platform,' said Ford. 'After decades as a CISO, I've seen firsthand how social engineering remains the most persistent and sophisticated threat facing organizations. Doppel's vision is to address this challenge at its core, by redefining how we defend against human-targeted attacks across email, social media, mobile and other attack surfaces.'
Hu will oversee financial planning, investor relations and more, bringing senior leadership experience from organizations such as BigID and Dataiku, where he helped raise $1B+ in venture capital and scale both companies into centaurs. In addition, overseeing all facets of marketing, Smrekar brings a strong track record of building and scaling comprehensive marketing teams. Prior to joining Doppel, Smrekar served as the VP of Brand Marketing and Interim CMO at dbt Labs, and led Brand and Corporate Marketing teams at Intercom and Okta.
This news comes on the heels of Doppel's $35 Million Series B funding round, announcing substantial company growth. In addition, Doppel recently opened its second office, located in New York, and surpassed 100 full-time employees. Over the last several months, the company expanded across all departments, hiring a full executive team of leaders who bring extensive experience to further drive company growth. Additional hires include SVP of Sales, Mike Ferrari and VP of Customer Success and Security Operations, Billy Jennings.
To learn more about Doppel and how the company is redefining social engineering defense, visit: https://www.doppel.com/, and if you are interested in joining the team, Doppel is actively hiring: https://www.doppel.com/jobs/.
Our enterprise-ready security platform is built to neutralize social engineering threats targeting your executives, employees, and third parties before they damage your business. Doppel Vision doesn't just play whack-a-mole with individual attacks, it links threats together, showing you threat actors' malicious infrastructure, protecting your brand and your customers against everything from phishing and fraud to deepfakes and brand impersonation.