Cequence Security has hired Russ Schafer as chief marketing officer. He was executive vice president of marketing at Fortinet and previously led product marketing and analyst relations at Check Point Software. He reports to CEO Ameya Talwalkar.
Cequence says it has just had its strongest quarter and its largest deal in company history, with new customers in the United States, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and the Middle East. One named customer is NTT DOCOMO, the Japanese mobile operator, which deployed Cequence's application and API protection to guard its service infrastructure and APIs.
The company's case is that AI agents reach enterprise data through the same APIs it already protects. Its Application and API Protection v9 adds an AI assistant and an MCP server, and an Agent Trust feature that verifies agent identity and blocks harmful behaviour. An AI Gateway ties tools, APIs, LLMs and permissions to defined agent personas. Cequence says its platform handles more than 10 billion API calls a day, and that it found Meta's Muse agent at over half of the customers it studied within two weeks of launch.
Cequence also co-authored the CIS Critical Security Controls Companion Guides for AI agents, LLMs and the Model Context Protocol, and co-chairs TM Forum's AI-Native Blueprint initiative.
Talwalkar said: "Enterprise leaders are just beginning to realise the sheer scale of the AI agent security and governance challenge." He said Schafer brings the strategic vision and marketing experience to build awareness and pipeline.
Schafer has more than 25 years in marketing at large companies and start-ups, with earlier roles at Intel, IBM, Sybase and Yahoo. At Cequence he will run corporate marketing, product marketing, demand generation, field marketing, analyst relations and creative services. "Cequence is solving the exact agentic AI security challenges that enterprise leaders are just beginning to discover," he said.
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