Kevin von Keyserling – Keyfactor

Why Nominated: Since founding his company in 2004, Kevin von Keyserling has transformed Keyfactor (formerly Certified Security Solutions) from a security consultancy to a digital identity management solutions provider that manages more than 500 million digital certificates for companies around the world. Over the last year, he closed the Cleveland, Ohio-area company’s largest funding round to date, increased headcount by 100 and oversaw the release of a critical product update. He’s also been spending considerable time developing a roadmap to secure the health care industry.

Profile: As Keyfactor CEO, von Keyserling is responsible for company operations, product management, sales and marketing, and platform enablement. Affectionately called “KvK” by his employees, von Keyserling exudes a passion for scouting emerging talent and fostering a learning environment for the industry’s best and brightest cybersecurity professionals. “KvK” is deeply committed to ensuring that every employee can pursue professional development opportunities and continue their education.

In January 2019, “KvK” secured an impressive $77 million from Insight Venture Partners – funds that will be used for talent acquisition and development and product innovation, with a focus on the health care industry and expansion into Europe.

Over the years, Keyfactor has created hundreds of infosec jobs in Cleveland, partnering with local universities to nurture technical talent, while helping establish the area as a growing software hotbed. Despite a global cyber workforce shortage, von Keyserling in the last year added more than 50 jobs, hiring key talent across Keyfactor’s development, customer success, and sales and marketing teams. 

Von Keyserling also recently developed and oversaw the release of Keyfactor 6, a critical product update that delivers crypto agility to enterprises, giving them the flexibility to adopt alternative, more secure cryptographic algorithms. Keyfactor 6 is KvK’s answer to problems such as code-signing abuse, the rise of IoT attacks, and the threat of quantum computing to traditional encryption. Indeed, Keyfactor is among the first companies to demonstrate quantum-resistant algorithms in real-life scenarios.

Meanwhile, von Keyserling has invested personal time and resources into building a security roadmap for the entire health care ecosystem to accommodate the advent of IoT devices in medicine. Efforts include working with regulatory agencies to impact policy and compliance for device manufacturers, and delivering high-assuring digital security for transformational technologies. 

What colleagues say: Kevin has been instrumental in building and guiding Keyfactor to what it is today… A commitment to excellence, respect for the individual, servant leadership, accountability, and a relentless focus on the customer are all key components, but perhaps his most important achievement has been creating an environment where co-workers are empowered to take risks, and mistakes are viewed as an opportunity for learning.” – Ted Shorter, CTO and co-founder, Keyfactor