Nasuni Hires Veracode Veteran Sam King As CEO

King, who had most recently spent five years as CEO of cybersecurity vendor Veracode, joins Nasuni in the midst of a new channel push at the data platform provider.

Nasuni announced Tuesday that it has hired former Veracode chief executive Sam King as its new CEO.

King was formerly a longtime executive at Veracode who rose through the ranks at the cybersecurity vendor to ultimately spend five years as its CEO, before stepping down in January.

[Related: Nasuni President On New Growth Funding: ‘We Did Not Need The Money At All’]

At Nasuni, King takes the reins as CEO in the midst of a new channel push at the data platform provider. In mid-March, the company unveiled a revamped partner program designed to help enable solution providers to capture major growth opportunities including around data management in hybrid cloud environments.

King succeeds Paul Flanagan, who had served as CEO of Nasuni for the past eight years and is stepping down as part of a planned transition, the company said in a news release.

Flanagan, a managing director at venture capital firm Sigma Partners, had been an investor in Nasuni prior to becoming its CEO in 2017, leading the company through milestones including a majority-stake investment last summer from Vista Equity Partners that valued the company at $1.2 billion. Flanagan will remain on the board of directors at Nasuni.

In a quote included in the news release, King said she is “energized to build on our exceptional relationships with customers and partners.” She pointed to the company’s role in enabling major opportunities for partners and customers around AI adoption and cloud migration, as well as enabling distributed workforces.

King had initially joined Veracode in 2006 — the year the company was founded — as vice president of service delivery, according to her LinkedIn profile. She went on to hold a series of roles at the company, leading up to her appointment as chief strategy officer in 2015 and then as CEO in 2019.

Earlier in her career, King had held positions at VeriSign, Guardent and Razorfish.

In a post on LinkedIn, King wrote that Nasuni has “extraordinary potential” ahead for its file data platform, saying that Nasuni “sits at the critical intersection of infrastructure and security for an organization’s most valuable asset – its data.”

“Nasuni is pioneering the cyberstorage category,” she wrote. “In an era of escalating ransomware threats, Nasuni’s built-in protection and instant recovery capabilities embody the ‘secure-by-design’ approach that experts have advocated for decades.”

Nasuni also has a “pivotal role in the AI revolution,” King wrote. “There is no AI strategy without a robust data strategy, and no data strategy without effectively mastering unstructured file data—precisely where Nasuni excels.”

Founded in 2009 by Andres Rodriguez, who was formerly Nasuni’s CEO and continues to serve as its CTO, Nasuni’s specialty is in providing a data platform that can “replace what legacy network-attached storage was doing with on-prem hardware in the cloud,” Nasuni President David Grant told CRN last year.

“We orchestrate and consolidate and protect all the file data of a large enterprise,” Grant said at the time.