Early-stage investor · CISO · Security faculty

Anthony Candeias

Early-stage investor and advisor in cybersecurity and AI. Chief Information Security Officer at a global investment firm. Security faculty at Columbia, NYU, and Fordham.

Anthony Candeias

Investing

What I look for

I invest and advise at the earliest stages, mostly in the categories I work in daily as an operator. I bring deep product experience from the buying side — helping founders shape products that enterprise security teams will actually deploy — and help them raise from the top venture firms in cybersecurity.

Most of my portfolio sits in AI-native security operations, identity, endpoint and data defense, and the infrastructure for running AI agents safely in production. Occasionally I back a strong team outside security where the same operating experience applies.

Portfolio

Investments & exits

Exits

  • CalypsoAI AI security and model-risk platform for the enterprise. Acquired by F5 · $180M
  • Clarity Deepfake detection and AI-driven social-engineering defense with patent-pending media authentication. Acquired by Deel

Investments

  • Glow

    Prevention-first endpoint security for the era of AI agents on the endpoint — out of stealth with $180M raised at a $1.2B valuation.

  • Mate Security

    AI-native SOC platform that adapts in real time using organizational context to eliminate alert fatigue.

  • FIG Security

    Finds and fixes broken security flows across the SecOps stack — simulate and deploy changes with confidence.

  • Autoheal

    AI platform for SRE and support engineering — multi-agent incident triage and resolution to cut MTTR.

  • Vivid

    Stealth — enterprise AI.

Advisory

  • Opti

    AI-native identity and access management across human, non-human, and agentic identities.

  • Dune Security

    AI-powered adaptive risk management — simulates multi-channel attacks and tailors controls to each user’s risk profile.

  • ArmsCyber

    Automated moving-target defense against ransomware — deceptive tripwires and stealth archival.

  • NovaNav

    AI-powered surgical recovery platform — pre-op reminders, patient check-ins, CMS PROMs compliance.

  • Generate Security

    AI-powered cyber business intelligence — continuous, AI-driven insight that connects security programs to business priorities for CISOs and boards.

Operating

Chief Information Security Officer

Since 2025 I’ve led enterprise security at a major global investment firm — a mandate that runs from detection and response and offensive security through engineering, architecture, governance, and third-party risk.

I run security as a business function. The job is to understand what the firm is trying to do, price the risk honestly, and build controls that let it move at full speed — enabling decisions rather than blocking them. Right now that mostly means AI: securing the firm’s adoption of AI and autonomous agents while putting the same technology to work in its defense.

Before this: CISO & VP of IT at WeightWatchers, where I built and led the security program; Director of Cybersecurity at Columbia University; earlier years at Goldman Sachs and the Ford Foundation. Along the way, deep experience investigating and defending against nation-state APTs.

Teaching

Faculty appointments

  • Columbia University Lecturer · 2025 — Present
  • New York University Adjunct Instructor · 2017 — 2025
  • Fordham University Adjunct Faculty · 2014 — 2025

Graduate cybersecurity instruction across enterprise risk, threat management, secure architecture, and security engineering — a decade of students now working across New York’s security teams.

In public

Speaking, writing, and open source

Speaking

Writing

On air

Open source

Longer-form thinking lands on Substack; tooling under ACandeias on GitHub.