StackHawk, the company re-imagining AppSec for the AI era, announces the addition of Joe Sullivan to its board of directors. Sullivan, who served as Chief Security Officer at Meta, Uber, and Cloudflare during critical growth periods, is one of the most respected security luminaries in the technology industry. The appointment comes as StackHawk scales its go-to-market efforts, driven by customer demand for security testing that matches AI development velocity.
“AI coding tools have created a complete paradigm shift in application security,” said Sullivan. “They’re generating applications faster than traditional security approaches were designed to handle, and simultaneously getting better at catching bugs in code itself. That means the job for security professionals shifts entirely to what happens when code runs. StackHawk is the only company I’ve seen that tests applications the way attackers exploit them: dynamically, in CI/CD, before production. That’s the approach that makes sense in 2026.”
A recent survey from StackHawk shows 87% of organizations have already adopted AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code, driving code velocity up to 10x. Despite this seismic shift in code development, traditional security solutions haven’t evolved to match AI development velocity.
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Static analysis floods teams with alerts that can’t be triaged at AI development speed, while legacy DAST is too slow and rigid to run in modern development pipelines. The result: overwhelmed security teams with more exploitable vulnerabilities and business logic flaws making their way into production environments.
“Joe works with just a select few companies at a time, only joining when he clearly sees where the industry should head,” said Joni Klippert, CEO and co-founder of StackHawk. “His conviction in runtime testing validates what customers are telling us: they can’t afford to wait until production to find exploitable vulnerabilities, and they can’t triage the noise from traditional tools at AI development speed.”
Sullivan brings more than two decades of security leadership to StackHawk. At Meta, he built the security program during the company’s rapid expansion from startup to global platform. At Uber, he led security through a period of intense regulatory scrutiny and organizational transformation. At Cloudflare, he helped scale security for the internet infrastructure protecting millions of websites worldwide. His work as an advisor includes Lakera, Pangea, SGNL and Seraphic, all of whom recently had strong exits.
Sullivan joins as the company accelerates its market expansion through the recently launched Alliance & Reseller Program, bringing runtime testing to more security teams navigating AI-driven development.
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