Thought Leadership & Achievement Judging Committee

Priyanka Aash is Co-Founder & VP of Marketing at FireCompass, an Agentic AI

platform for autonomous penetration testing and red teaming trusted by Fortune 1000 enterprises. She is credited with building global communities for cybersecurity leaders and shaping enterprise marketing strategies for over a decade.

Priyanka began her career as a computer-science engineer, working on systems and software at companies like Infosys, Bank of America, and Sony. While she loved designing and building, she realized that the real lever for defending against cybersecurity threats was not just technology; it was people, community, and collaboration amongst the defenders. That conviction led her to help build

CISOPlatform, the world's first online platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing among senior information security executives. As part of the all-women-led team at CISOPlatform, she worked closely with marketing and go-to-market teams at Google, IBM, VMware, F5 Networks, Barracuda Networks, Check Point, and others, driving inbound marketing, community growth, and enterprise engagement at scale.

From there, she co-founded FireCompass, a company built on the insight that attackers move in hours while defenders test once a year. FireCompass was designed to close that gap with AI that thinks like an attacker, acts at machine speed, and surfaces only attack-path-based, exploitable risks that truly matter. At FireCompass, Priyanka spearheaded the creation of the CART (Continuous Automated Red Teaming) category and helped establish the company as a category-defining platform. FireCompass has earned 30+ analyst recognitions across Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and GigaOm, and was showcased at the RSAC 365 Innovation Showcase.

Priyanka's work at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and community has earned significant recognition. She was honored as one of SC Media's 2025 Women in IT Security Power Players - a distinction awarded to leaders shaping the future of the industry. She has been nominated for AI Security Innovator of the Year at the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards and honored with the NetApp Excellerate HER award for her contributions to leadership and innovation in technology.

She is also the author of The AI Divide, a book that explores how artificial intelligence is quietly rewiring human minds and influencing decisions, and what that means for the future of security, business, and society. Her thought leadership has been featured in Authority Magazine, Financial Express, CXOToday, and YourStory.

Priyanka is passionate about entrepreneurship, enterprise marketing strategy, and building communities that empower CISOs worldwide. She believes the next great revolution in cybersecurity will not be about defense alone; it will be about fighting AI with AI, defense at machine speed.

Senior Manager for Product & Design Recruiting at Rippling, leading the North America function. 10+ years in talent acquisition across the US and Europe — was Rippling's first recruiting hire in Europe, responsible for establishing the company's initial presence and opening first offices in London and Dublin. Led product recruiting for EMEA at Uber.

Kriti Bansal is VP of Finance & Accounting at AlphaPoint, a digital-asset infrastructure company, reporting to the CEO. With 14+ years across Deloitte audit, SaaS finance, and crypto-native accounting, she specializes in ASC 606 revenue recognition and digital-asset accounting, and has led multi-year audit completions and multi-jurisdiction reporting. M.S. Finance.

Shixun Chen is an iF Design & MUSE Platinum winning Industrial Product Designer specializing in AI robotics and full-lifecycle service design. An ArtCenter MS alumna holding key U.S. patents cited by tech conglomerates, she manages end-to-end cycles from strategy to mass production. She also serves as an INSEAD EMBA Design Coach.

Jose Galarza is a technology executive with more than 15 years of experience building and scaling digital products and engineering organizations. He is a VP of Engineering at Wise, where he leads the engineering organization responsible for Wise's global product experience, serving more than 19 million customers.

Monique Kelley is a trusted, purpose-driven communications and career readiness professor, consultant, and best-selling author who serves in a fractional capacity for Fortune 50 and global biopharma companies seeking a strategic communications head who advances business objectives and alleviates their headaches. She's been featured in Forbes, People magazine, ABC, FOX, etc.

A profound Leader and Coach with 25 plus years of rich experience towards customer centricity in developing strategies for creating value and profits for organizations. Ability to convert strategies into actions by driving sales force, working on KPIs, tactics and daily operations, improve effectiveness, change management based on current needs.

Sudheer Pratap is a technology leader and Vice President with over 15 years of experience in software engineering, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, Azure cloud migration, enterprise architecture, microservices, and digital transformation. He specializes in designing and delivering large-scale enterprise technology solutions for banking, financial services, and retail organizations.

Educated in business and marketing, Trena Roudebush found herself pulled toward communications as a way to connect people, ideas and communities. After working on energy policy and permitting at state and local levels, Trena is the Chief Communications Officer for the City of Indianapolis, focusing on economic development, land use & historic preservation.

April White is CEO & Founder of Trust Relations, a national strategic communications agency she launched in 2019 after nearly 20 years at leading PR firms. A former journalist and TEDx speaker, she's a multi-time Stevie Award winner, including Gold for Most Innovative Woman and Silver for Maverick of the Year.