The exec team
Darren Ridge
Co-Founder · Chairman
Darren co-founded Onecom and grew it into the UK's largest independent B2B telecoms provider. Across 4 decades he's founded, scaled, and exited businesses spanning telecoms and technology - and knows firsthand what it takes to build one worth protecting.
Aaron Brown
Co-Founder · CEO
Aaron co-founded and scaled Onecom into the UK's largest independent B2B telecoms provider and Vodafone's top strategic partner. He's spent two decades building businesses that serve tens of thousands of companies like yours.
Ben O'Nion
Head of Growth
Ben leads growth on CyberProtect, turning hard security into something a business owner can actually use. A two-time Young Entrepreneur of the Year, he's obsessed with making protection simple enough that running your business always comes first.
Stuart Taylor
Head of Development
Stuart is the architect behind the technology that turns messy exposure into clear, provable action - the engine that does the work businesses can't. With years spent building security systems that hold up at scale, he makes sure the product always delivers on its promise.
Security advisor
Ricardo Valdes
Most tools bolt AI on at the end. Rick has built detection around it for years.
Ethical hacker
Ricardo Valdes
Platform Advisor · CyberProtect
15+
Years on offense
1,000s
Environments defended
24/7
Always monitoring
Before most of the industry was talking about AI in security, Rick was building it into the core of real detection systems. He's spent his career architecting AI-powered SIEM platforms that correlate millions of signals in real time and run live security operations for organisations in some of the most regulated industries there are - the kind of environments where a missed detection isn't an inconvenience, it's a breach.
That's exactly why he matters to CyberProtect. Plenty of tools can collect data. Far fewer can make sense of it fast enough to act - separating the one signal that matters from the ten thousand that don't, in time to do something about it. Rick has spent his career solving that problem at scale, mapping detection to the frameworks businesses are actually judged against: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI. He knows what enterprise-grade really means, because he's had to build to it.
At CyberProtect, he helps shape the intelligence layer - how the platform ingests, correlates and prioritises what it finds, so exposure gets surfaced and resolved rather than buried in noise. His standard is the one that comes from running real operations: if it wouldn't hold up defending a regulated business at 3am, it isn't good enough. That's the bar he holds the platform to.
