BreachRx Adds Former Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables to Board as AI Raises the Stakes for Incident Response

BreachRx has appointed Phil Venables, partner at Ballistic Ventures and former CISO of Google Cloud and Goldman Sachs, to its board of directors, a move that signals how quickly cyber incident response is becoming a board-level systems problem.

The company, which builds cyber incident response management software, is positioning Venables’ appointment around a larger shift in enterprise security: breaches, privacy events, third-party outages, rogue AI agents, and regulatory deadlines are now colliding faster than most organizations can coordinate. The old model of response, built around static playbooks, spreadsheet trackers, legal calls, Slack threads, and executive status meetings, is starting to buckle under the pressure.

“Phil is the standard bearer for how CISOs should approach business disruption and incident response,” said Andy Lunsford, CEO of BreachRx. “His perspective is perfectly aligned with the problem we built BreachRx to solve. The attacks are hitting us at machine speed, but our response is often siloed, chaotic, and ill-equipped to evolving AI threats. Companies need clear ownership, a single source of truth, structured workflows, and the ability to make aligned cross-functional decisions with incidents that can develop at machine speed. Phil’s experience with CISOs, boards, and regulators will be invaluable as we scale BreachRx adoption.”

Venables’ résumé makes the appointment notable. At Goldman Sachs and Google Cloud, he operated at the intersection of cybersecurity, enterprise risk, technology governance, and executive accountability. At Ballistic Ventures, he now works with cybersecurity companies trying to define new categories in a market being reshaped by AI, regulation, and escalating attacker automation.

That context matters because incident response is no longer just a security operations function. A serious breach can pull in legal, privacy, compliance, communications, IT, outside counsel, executives, insurers, customers, and regulators within hours. In the age of AI-driven cyberattacks, the window for clean decision-making is shrinking.

“Through decades of experience as a security leader across some of the world’s largest organizations, I’ve seen firsthand that cybersecurity, more than ever, requires an enterprise response capability and depends on the ability to manage complexity at speed,” said Phil Venables, Partner at Ballistic Ventures. “BreachRx’s focus on scaling disciplined incident response aligns deeply with the needs of enterprises facing more simultaneous, complex, and scrutinized cyber events.”

BreachRx is betting that the next phase of cyber resilience will depend less on having another alerting tool and more on building a command layer for response. Its platform is designed to coordinate cross-functional work, assign ownership, manage regulatory and contractual timelines, preserve privileged collaboration, track live status, and create an audit-ready record while an incident is still unfolding.

The company is also leaning into AI-native incident response. Its agentic AI features are designed to generate tasks, summarize activity, flag gaps, translate obligations into plain language, and help teams stay aligned as events change.

For CISOs, the message is blunt: attackers are using automation to move faster, while enterprises are still asking humans to coordinate high-risk decisions across fragmented channels. BreachRx wants to become the system of record for that chaos. Venables joining the board gives the company a high-profile voice at exactly the moment when incident response is shifting from a technical workflow to a core enterprise governance discipline.