CLEVELAND, May 14 — Binary Defense, the trusted Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and enterprise defense provider, today announced that founder Dave Kennedy has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer. Kennedy, who founded Binary Defense in 2014 and has served on its board and as Chief Hacking Officer, is taking the helm to personally lead the company through its most significant technology transformation: the development and rapid deployment of NightBeacon, Binary Defense’s agentic AI platform for security operations.
“This is a defining moment for Binary Defense – we are building the next phase of cyber defense, one that won’t just match rapidly advancing threats, but fundamentally change the dynamic between defenders and attackers,” said Dave Kennedy, Founder and CEO of Binary Defense. “The threat landscape is evolving faster than at any point in my career, and companies cannot afford to operate at anything less than machine speed. We built NightBeacon because defenders deserve a SOC solution that outpaces threats, not just reacts to them. This is how we ensure defenders always have the edge.”
NightBeacon and the Agentic SOC
NightBeacon is Binary Defense’s agentic AI platform designed to fundamentally enhance how security analysts and engineers operate. Unlike approaches that seek to replace human defenders, NightBeacon is built on the principle that the best security operations will always require human judgment at the center, augmented by AI that handles the speed and scale humans alone cannot match.
The platform delivers agentic capabilities across threat detection, investigation, and response workflows, enabling security teams to operate with dramatically greater speed and accuracy while keeping experienced practitioners in command of critical decisions.
“We are not building AI that replaces defenders. We are building AI that makes every defender on our platform superhuman,” said Kennedy. “That distinction matters. It is the difference between security operations that actually work in production and a science experiment. NightBeacon is built by practitioners, for practitioners.”
Founder-Led Innovation at the Pace the Market Demands
Under Kennedy’s leadership, Binary Defense will accelerate its product development cadence with a commitment to rapid prototyping, customer-driven iteration, and publicly committed delivery timelines for new NightBeacon capabilities.
“The threats our customers face are not waiting, and neither are we,” said Kennedy. “We have evolved our operations to prototype fast, ship fast, and iterate in the open with the defenders who use our platform every day.”
Investor Support
Binary Defense’s growth and transformation have been supported by Invictus Growth Partners, which remains the company’s sole institutional investor following a $36 million growth equity investment in 2022.
“This is a defining inflection point for both Binary Defense and the broader cybersecurity industry,” said Jeremy Lai, Partner at Invictus Growth Partners. “It is increasingly clear that AI alone is not a set-and-forget solution for the enterprise SOC. NightBeacon is a category-defining platform that combines the power of agentic AI with elite practitioner expertise to help organizations operate at machine speed without sacrificing human judgment.”
“There is no one better suited than Dave Kennedy to lead Binary Defense into this next chapter, and we are incredibly excited about the company’s future,” Lai said.