Arctic Wolf Names Nick Schneider As New CEO Amid Growth Push

Brian NeSmith, who co-founded the security operations vendor, will move out of the CEO position and into the role of executive chairman.

Security operations technology firm Arctic Wolf has announced a change in leadership at the top, with the promotion of Nick Schneider to CEO, succeeding company co-founder Brian NeSmith in the role.

Schneider, who’d been serving as president and chief revenue officer of Arctic Wolf, has been named CEO of the company effective immediately. NeSmith, who co-founded Arctic Wolf in 2012, has moved into the role of executive chairman of the company’s board of directors.

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In a quote included in a news release, NeSmith said the change in leadership is taking place as Arctic Wolf looks to move “into its next phase of growth and global expansion.” NeSmith said he is “confident that [Schneider] is the best possible leader” for the company’s next phase.

The appointment of Schneider follows the $150 million Series F funding round that Arctic Wolf raised in July, giving the company funding for growth as well as a $4.3 billion valuation.

The company has been looking to grow its presence in the orchestration, remediation, deception, and cloud security spaces by making between five and 10 acquisitions over the next year, NeSmith told CRN in July. The company is working to expand beyond the its flagship managed detection and response (MDR) technology to offer managed risk, managed cloud operations, and managed security awareness—ultimately giving Arctic Wolf’s channel partners more ways to sell and generate incremental revenue, NeSmith said at the time.

Schneider has spent the past five years with Arctic Wolf, starting at the company in 2016 as head of worldwide sales and working his way up through several roles to become president and chief revenue officer this past February.

Prior to joining Arctic Wolf, Schneider had served as vice president of sales in North America for Code42 and as a regional sales manager for Dell, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In its news release, Arctic Wolf credits Schneider as “the driving force behind [the company’s] explosive growth,” which has included a doubling in annual recurring revenue growth each year he’s been with Arctic Wolf.

In the release, Schneider said that he and NeSmith will continue to work side-by-side in their new roles.

Arctic Wolf is “at the tip of the iceberg in terms of our market potential,” Schneider said in the release.

The Eden Prairie, Minn.-based company has also been looking to expand its channel presence with enterprise customers and beyond North America, executives have said. Arctic Wolf historically worked only with customers with less than 3,000 users until about a year ago, at which point the company expanded upmarket into the enterprise space and began taking on clients with between 3,000 and 50,000 users.

Arctic Wolf’s enterprise business is growing four times faster than the company as a whole, as large organizations face the complex task of defending against a significant greater number of attack vectors, NeSmith said in July. The company sells exclusively through the channel, NeSmith said at the time.

NeSmith was previously the president and CEO of Blue Coat Systems between 1999 and 2001. Blue Coat went on to be acquired by Symantec in 2016 for $4.65 billion.