Francois K.

As CEO of Defants, I drive the strategic vision, product innovation, and business development of a deeptech startup specializing in cyber threat investigation.

Key Responsibilities:

🎯 Strategy and Vision: Defining Defants' differentiating positioning in the cybersecurity market, with an exclusive focus on incident response, threat hunting, and forensics.

🧠 Technological Innovation: Co-designing a unique semantic investigation engine based on knowledge graphs and LLM agent orchestration, recognized by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor 2023”.

🤝 Strategic Partnerships: Establishing technological and commercial collaborations with MSSPs, cyber insurers, and key players in the modern SOC.

🚀 Go-to-Market: Developing and executing the commercial strategy in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland) with a direct and indirect approach through partners.

📈 Growth & Funding: Fundraising (€1M in seed round), investor relations, governance management, and financial runway piloting in a demanding context.

👥 Leadership & Culture: Managing a multidisciplinary team, integrating founding profiles, and creating a culture that combines operational rigor, resilience, and innovation.

Cyber threats and malicious code: analysis and countermeasures. This certified course is divided into three phases:

- A monitoring phase: understanding modes of action to anticipate effects

- An alert phase: detecting the effects of malicious code

- A response phase: minimizing, stopping, or reducing the impact of malicious code

As an incident response consultant at Mandiant, I was involved in the most sophisticated cyberattacks targeting major companies and critical institutions in France and internationally.

Key Responsibilities:

⚔️ Advanced Incident Response: Post-compromise investigation of targeted attacks (APT, ransomware, cloud intrusion), including evidence collection, forensic analysis, and attack path reconstruction.

🧩 Multidomain Expertise: Interventions on hybrid environments (on-premise, cloud, Microsoft 365, Active Directory) and use of cutting-edge proprietary tools.

🕵️ Applied Threat Intelligence: Real-time cross-referencing with Mandiant Threat Intelligence data to enrich investigations and identify attacker groups.

💡 Strategic Consulting: Advising CISOs and CIOs on crisis management, prioritized remediation, and the implementation of post-incident hardening plans.

🌐 Reputation & Influence: Contributing to Mandiant's influence in Europe through experience sharing and contributions to improving clients' cyber maturity.