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Darktrace has appointed its third permanent chief executive in the past 18 months, amid a push by its new private equity backers to accelerate growth at the UK cyber security group.
Ed Jennings, who previously led US cloud-based work management platform Quickbase, will take over later this month, according to a person familiar with the matter and internal communication seen by the Financial Times
Jennings will be tasked with returning Darktrace to greater topline growth, according to the person familiar with his appointment. He replaces Charles Goodman, Darktrace’s chair, who was appointed interim CEO in January.
Darktrace has been on the hunt for a new head after Jill Popelka, who led the company since it was taken private in a £4.3bn deal by US private equity group Thoma Bravo, departed after 16 months in the job.
She had taken over from Poppy Gustafsson, who stepped down as CEO in September 2024, ahead of the completion of the Thoma Bravo takeover.
Since acquiring Darktrace, Thoma Bravo has sought to expand the Cambridge-based group’s presence in the US in a bid to surpass $1bn in revenues and compete with larger rivals Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.
The company plans to invest more than $200mn in the US in 2026 — up 11 per cent from 2025 — in a bid to grow its US sales to half of its total revenues.
Darktrace’s move to deepen its presence in the US comes as the group seeks to boost growth by tapping into rising demand for cyber security as companies are increasingly targeted by hackers.
Like Popelka, Jennings is based in the US, where Darktrace has also opened a new deployment centre and appointed two new US-based executives.
His experience as chief operating officer of Mimecast, a London-headquartered network security group, during a period which saw it list on the Nasdaq in 2015, was understood to be a factor in his appointment, the person said.
Analysts expect that Thoma Bravo could look to relist Darktrace in New York as one possible exit option.
Darktrace, which was founded in 2013 by a group of mathematicians and cyber security experts, listed in London in 2021 and had a turbulent ride on the public markets.
It also struggled to disentangle itself from ties with Mike Lynch and Autonomy, the UK software group he founded, before the British entrepreneur was acquitted of criminal charges in June in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases. He was among seven people who died after the superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in August 2024.
In 2023, New York-based Quintessential Capital Management published a report alleging Darktrace appeared to have simulated or anticipated sales to “phantom” customers through a “network of willing resellers”.
Darktrace rebutted the claims and commissioned EY to review its key financial processes and controls. Later that year Darktrace said neither its management nor board considered “EY’s report to have any impact on Darktrace’s previously filed public company financial statements.”
