The San Francisco Bay Area remains one of the most important cybersecurity markets in the world, and women leaders continue to play central roles in companies spanning compliance, connectivity, feature management, observability, cloud-native security, and post-quantum protection. The leaders in this group reflect that breadth across both established platforms and newer security companies.
Michelle Zatlyn
Co-Founder & President — Cloudflare
Michelle Zatlyn is the co-founder and president of Cloudflare. Before starting the company, she worked at Google and Toshiba and launched two startups, and she has remained one of the most visible women leaders in Bay Area cybersecurity and infrastructure.
Cloudflare is based in San Francisco and operates a large connectivity and security platform spanning network services, application performance, and cyber protection. Its scale and product breadth keep Zatlyn closely tied to one of the Bay Area’s most durable security and internet infrastructure companies.
Edith Harbaugh
CEO & Co-Founder — LaunchDarkly
Edith Harbaugh is the co-founder of LaunchDarkly and returned to the CEO role in 2025. She is closely associated with the creation of the feature management category and has long been part of the Bay Area enterprise software and developer tooling ecosystem.
LaunchDarkly is a San Francisco company whose platform helps software teams manage releases, feature flags, experimentation, and operational control. While the company sits at the edge of software delivery and security, its role in controlling production behavior and reducing release risk gives it a clear place in the broader security and trust landscape.
Christine Yen
CEO & Co-Founder — Honeycomb
Christine Yen is the CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb. Her background includes engineering roles at Parse and other software companies, and she has become a well-known voice in observability and developer infrastructure.
Honeycomb is a San Francisco company focused on observability, giving engineering and security teams better visibility into complex systems and production behavior. As modern software environments become more distributed and harder to monitor, that makes Honeycomb increasingly relevant to resilience, reliability, and operational security.
Rebecca Krauthamer
CEO & Co-Founder — QuSecure
Rebecca Krauthamer is the CEO and co-founder of QuSecure. Her background spans quantum computing, machine learning, and startup leadership, and she has become one of the most visible Bay Area executives working in post-quantum security.
QuSecure is based in San Mateo and focuses on post-quantum cybersecurity and cryptographic agility. The company’s work is centered on helping organizations prepare for the security implications of quantum computing, which places Krauthamer in one of the more forward-looking corners of the Bay Area security market.
Brooke Motta
CEO & Co-Founder — RAD Security
Brooke Motta is the CEO and co-founder of RAD Security. Her public professional profile places her in San Francisco, and her work has centered on building cloud-native security tools for modern engineering and operations teams.
RAD Security is based in San Francisco and focuses on cloud-native and AI-driven security operations. The company is part of a newer wave of Bay Area security startups building around the realities of containerized infrastructure, cloud environments, and automated security workflows.
Where Bay Area Women in Cybersecurity Are Leading
These five leaders represent different parts of the Bay Area cybersecurity market. Cloudflare operates at internet scale, LaunchDarkly at the intersection of release control and software safety, Honeycomb in observability, QuSecure in post-quantum protection, and RAD Security in cloud-native defense.
That range reflects how broad cybersecurity has become in the region. Bay Area security now stretches across connectivity, compliance, developer controls, observability, cryptography, and cloud operations rather than sitting inside a single product category.
The Bay Area’s innovation story also extends into enterprise AI and applied machine intelligence. Read the San Francisco Bay Area Women AI Founders to Watch in 2026 for another look at the women building the region’s next generation of AI companies.
