John Stewart

(fmr) SVP/CSTO Cisco —- Angel Investor / Startup Whisperer / Anti-poaching Advocate at Talons Ventures, LLC

📍 San Francisco Bay Area, United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 27 investments📅 9 years investing🗓 Last invested Mar 2025
VC🌍 United States20+ investments
27
Total investments
12
Early stage
4
Mid stage
6
Late stage
9y
Years active

Portfolio

25 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor & Advisor
Mar 2025
SPLX is the leading AI security platform for Fortune 500 companies and global enterprises. We help organizations accelerate safe and trusted AI adoption by securing LLM-powered systems across the entire lifecycle – from development to deployment. Our platform combines automated AI red teaming, real-time threat detection & response, and compliance mapping to uncover vulnerabilities, block live threats, and enforce AI policies at scale. Built by AI security experts and world-class red teamers, SPLX empowers security, engineering, and risk teams to adopt LLMs, chatbots, and agents with confidence – protecting against prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage, off-topic responses, privilege escalation, and evolving threats. Whether youre deploying internal copilots or external-facing assistants, SPLX gives you the visibility, control, and automation needed to stay ahead of AI risks and regulations.
Board Member
Nov 2024
A network for entrepreneurs building in stealth. Submit your information here so investors can find you: harmonic.ai/get-discovered
Board Member
Nov 2024
For Corporate: Xeris empowers enterprises to swiftly deploy secure AI Assistants connected directly to company data. Sandboxed MCP Servers protect against data leaks and unauthorized access, security policy for CISO team included. Simple, secure, effective, making AI adoption effortless. For Developer: Xeris provides developers secure, instant API access to sandboxed MCP Servers. Seamlessly integrate protected enterprise data into your AI applications. Less security hassle, more innovation, accelerate your development with Xeris.
Investor
Sep 2024
OptimEyes.ai is a unique AI-powered, on-demand SaaS solution for cyber-security, data privacy and compliance risk modeling. We are the first to create industry-specific risk benchmarking, providing an inside-out, holistic view of your enterprise risk including financial exposure and prediction of impact costs. Improve decision-making through neuroscience based, multi-persona dashboards that enable unbiased, consistent decisions your board can rely on. Our advanced AI / ML algorithmic technology enables industry risk benchmarking; real-time and trackable risk scoring; and predictive analytics to identify and quantify future risk. The solution uses proprietary technology to: 1) Discover: Track and measure numerous parameters to quantify individual risk from multiple risk sources 
 2) Prioritize: Dynamic, continuous and proactive monitoring of individual risks providing real-time insights to prevent risk escalation 
 3) Predict: Leverage AI to predict risk incidences and auto assign risk levels based on historical data 
 4) Optimize: Automate risk mitigation workflow and make AI-powered mitigation recommendations. 

Seed Investor
Jan 2024
Surveys predict purchase intent at 20–30% accuracy. Heatseeker closes that gap. Were an insight-to-action GTM engine built on ground truth — replacing slow, opinion-based market research with live behavioural experiments and AI-powered predictive models. 85–95% correlation to real buying behaviour, delivered in days instead of months. The core mechanic: Investigate your market, Generate data-driven strategies and creative with AI, then Validate with real customer behaviour before you spend. The go/no-go decision layer for every major marketing bet. Trusted by marketing leaders at DoorDash, LOréal, Uber, Cisco, KPMG, and Boost Mobile. Disrupting a $90B legacy market research industry. Backed by Hearst, Capital F, and Even Capital. Founded 2023, Sydney + US.
Board Member, Investor
Dec 2023
AI_Assisted Platform for Cybersecurity. The Ultimate Human-AI Partnership for Cybersecurity - a unique blend of human expertise, Natural Language Processing, continuous retraining, and Deep Learning to deliver the ultimate solution to SOC challenges, ensuring an exceptional experience.
Advisor, Investor
Aug 2023
Your business has a mobile blind spot. Traditional MDM and MTD tools weren’t built to detect today’s mobile threats. As a result, critical attack vectors remain invisible: - Silent spyware operating without user awareness - SIM swap attacks that bypass identity and MFA protections - URL-less smishing that evades traditional detection - Labor-intensive mobile app vetting that doesn’t scale iVerify addresses these gaps with a purpose-built Mobile EDR platform. iVerify Enterprise continuously inspects device-level signals across iOS and Android, including diagnostic logs, process metadata, and behavioral anomalies. By correlating these signals with proprietary threat intelligence, iVerify enables: - Detection of advanced spyware and exploitation frameworks - Behavioral threat hunting across mobile devices - Identification of SIM swap risk and account takeover signals - Protection against modern smishing and social engineering attacks - Continuous, high-fidelity mobile threat intelligence With deep integrations into leading MDM and MAM solutions, iVerify allows teams to deploy quickly, enforce policy, and operationalize mobile threat detection within their existing security stack. Organizations trust iVerify to protect employees, executives, and high-risk users from the fastest-growing and least visible attack surface in the enterprise. 👉 Book a demo to see how iVerify can close your mobile blind spots
Advisor, Investor
Jun 2023
CodeLock is a patent-pending SaaS solution for DevSecOps that provides continuous software security at the code level. CodeLock is accessed through automated compliance dashboards that allow managers to track, trace, audit, and secure software development frameworks (NIST 800-218, SSDF). User-friendly dashboards provide performance metrics that can also be used to measure, monitor, and optimize the Software Development Lifecycle (SLDC). In addition to providing our clients’ previously unavailable level of security and protection, CodeLock provides managers unparalleled insights into the performance and productivity of their employees – without negatively impacting the efficiency, quality, or speed of developers; a critical capability as work has become increasingly geographically dispersed and virtualized. In addition to improving Security and Accountability, CodeLock also provides our clients with a low-cost turnkey solution for meeting the Compliance requirements mandated by new software development security regulations. CodeLock uses proprietary technology to create a forensic chain of custody between Software Developers and every line of code they create, thereby providing businesses and enterprise-level software consumers with unprecedented protection, incorruptible nonrepudiation, and assurance that compliance standards are met. Unlike other solutions, CodeLock provides a window into the entirety of the SDLC and correlates that information from different vendors and software repository platforms across the Software Supply Chain. CodeLock was designed to provide immediate value to small and mid-sized businesses and is infinitely scalable to accommodate larger enterprise organizations with tens of thousands of developers. During the development process, CodeLock captures critical data and metadata that provide our clients organizations invaluable and irrefutable insights regarding when, from where, and by whom each line of code is produced.
Investor
Mar 2022
Command Zero is the autonomous and AI-assisted SOC platform built for complex enterprise environments. The platform combines an expert-encoded knowledge base, controlled AI agents, and human-led investigation tools to deliver consistent, auditable analysis at scale. Through a federated data model, Command Zero connects directly to your existing data sources—identity systems, EDR, cloud platforms, SIEM—without data ingestion or migration. Analysts and AI agents work from the same encoded knowledge base, ensuring predictable outcomes across all tiers. AI agents handle high-volume tier-1 tasks and standard investigations, then pass their work—tools, context, and findings—to human analysts for complex cases. The result: Faster mean time to understand and respond, with best practices that scale through both AI automation and human expertise.
Board Member
Feb 2022
SightGain is the first technology of its kind that marries IT and finance for you to solve the ongoing challenge of balancing investments and cyber risk. By continuously proving and improving your cybersecurity risk management capabilities, SightGain enables you to make better decisions about where to invest your money, time, and resources. Our Threat Exposure Management Platform tests your entire security ecosystem – people, processes, and technology – so you can be confident in your ability to protect your business.
Board Member, Investor
Jan 2022
Vaultree is revolutionising data enablement and security through our pioneering Data-In-Use Encryption solutions. Our industry-leading technology ensures that data remains encrypted throughout its entire lifecycle, enabling businesses with previously inhibited use cases and growth opportunities via in-use encrypted searches, analyses, sharing and collaboration, AI/ML modelling, and data visualisation. Vaultree’s solutions and approach to data enablement empower organisations to unlock and harness their data, driving compliant innovation while drastically reducing cyber threats.
Board Member, Investor
Oct 2021
Theom is an AI-driven Data Access Governance (DAG) and Security platform that enables organizations to comprehensively manage, control, and monitor access to sensitive data. Theoms primary goal is to ensure that the right people have access to the right data at the right time, minimizing the risks of data breaches and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations. Theom is embedded within your data lakes and warehouses and builds superior governance and breach detection capabilities, all without transferring any data out. Theom adopts a data-centric approach to securing access to data, focusing on the data itself rather than just the systems and networks that house it. This approach ensures that data is secure throughout its lifecycle as it moves through the pipelines, regardless of where it resides. Theoms data classification and discovery features identify sensitive data, ensuring proper access controls are in place. With Theom, enterprises gain granular access control allowing enterprises to define specific permissions to prevent unauthorized access and maintain a strict level of security by limiting access to only those who require it. Theom monitors all data access events for suspicious activity building on a user/role’s fingerprint. Once there is any abnormal activity, Theom takes action on potential data breach attacks using SIEM/SOAR integrations in a fully automated or hybrid approach. Theom is the only product that detects attacks on cloud data lakes and warehouses and maps them to the MITRE &ATTACK framework. With Theom, organizations can generate comprehensive reports demonstrating compliance with various data protection regulations built on NIST, HIPAA, Hitrust, and CIS. Theom supports Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, and AWS. Enterprises can enable a unified and consistent approach to access governance across the data clouds, reducing the complexity and overhead associated with managing multiple security solutions.
Investor
Sep 2021
Multi-Instance Management Platform for ServiceNow xtype empowers ServiceNow platform teams to innovate faster, govern multiple instances, shrink the backlog, ensure compliance, and reduce operational risk.
Friend to the Company, Investor
Jul 2021
MeasuredRisk is the worlds exclusive purveyor of business survivability diagnostics, offering real-time, AI-driven decision intelligence that mitigates risk, secures supply chains, and fortifies external relationships.
Board Member, Investor
Apr 2021
Whether data is stored in the cloud, on premises, or in a hybrid environment, no business should have to fear a catastrophic data breach. Calamu Protect™ is an innovative data protection technology that turns data into valueless fragments and scatters them to multiple storage locations automatically. Data is instantly reassembled when called for by an authorized application or user – and in the event of a cyber attack, Calamus patented self-healing technology mitigates any impact by reconstituting data to its original and uncorrupted condition. Using the intuitive SaaS console, combine your preferred storage locations or cloud providers into a safe #dataharbor, a virtually air-tight environment for data backups, mission-critical application data, or end user files. Visit Calamu.com/get-started today for live demo. Dont fear the breach!
Show all 25 investments ↓
Experience · 29 entries
All (29)
Investments (27)
Founder (1)
Board (16)
2025
Investor & Advisor
Mar 2025
SPLX is the leading AI security platform for Fortune 500 companies and global enterprises. We help organizations accelerate safe and trusted AI adoption by securing LLM-powered systems across the entire lifecycle – from development to deployment. Our platform combines automated AI red teaming, real-time threat detection & response, and compliance mapping to uncover vulnerabilities, block live threats, and enforce AI policies at scale. Built by AI security experts and world-class red teamers, SPLX empowers security, engineering, and risk teams to adopt LLMs, chatbots, and agents with confidence – protecting against prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage, off-topic responses, privilege escalation, and evolving threats. Whether youre deploying internal copilots or external-facing assistants, SPLX gives you the visibility, control, and automation needed to stay ahead of AI risks and regulations.
2024
Board Member
Nov 2024
A network for entrepreneurs building in stealth. Submit your information here so investors can find you: harmonic.ai/get-discovered
Board Member
Nov 2024
For Corporate: Xeris empowers enterprises to swiftly deploy secure AI Assistants connected directly to company data. Sandboxed MCP Servers protect against data leaks and unauthorized access, security policy for CISO team included. Simple, secure, effective, making AI adoption effortless. For Developer: Xeris provides developers secure, instant API access to sandboxed MCP Servers. Seamlessly integrate protected enterprise data into your AI applications. Less security hassle, more innovation, accelerate your development with Xeris.
Investor
Sep 2024
OptimEyes.ai is a unique AI-powered, on-demand SaaS solution for cyber-security, data privacy and compliance risk modeling. We are the first to create industry-specific risk benchmarking, providing an inside-out, holistic view of your enterprise risk including financial exposure and prediction of impact costs. Improve decision-making through neuroscience based, multi-persona dashboards that enable unbiased, consistent decisions your board can rely on. Our advanced AI / ML algorithmic technology enables industry risk benchmarking; real-time and trackable risk scoring; and predictive analytics to identify and quantify future risk. The solution uses proprietary technology to: 1) Discover: Track and measure numerous parameters to quantify individual risk from multiple risk sources 
 2) Prioritize: Dynamic, continuous and proactive monitoring of individual risks providing real-time insights to prevent risk escalation 
 3) Predict: Leverage AI to predict risk incidences and auto assign risk levels based on historical data 
 4) Optimize: Automate risk mitigation workflow and make AI-powered mitigation recommendations. 

Seed Investor
Jan 2024
Surveys predict purchase intent at 20–30% accuracy. Heatseeker closes that gap. Were an insight-to-action GTM engine built on ground truth — replacing slow, opinion-based market research with live behavioural experiments and AI-powered predictive models. 85–95% correlation to real buying behaviour, delivered in days instead of months. The core mechanic: Investigate your market, Generate data-driven strategies and creative with AI, then Validate with real customer behaviour before you spend. The go/no-go decision layer for every major marketing bet. Trusted by marketing leaders at DoorDash, LOréal, Uber, Cisco, KPMG, and Boost Mobile. Disrupting a $90B legacy market research industry. Backed by Hearst, Capital F, and Even Capital. Founded 2023, Sydney + US.
Show all 29 entries ↓
Investment activity
2017–2025 · 27 investments
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