President Biden appointed Amit Mital, a cybersecurity industry veteran, to the National Security Council (NSC) as the senior director for cybersecurity strategy and policy, Mital’s LinkedIn confirms. Mital will also serve in the White House as a special assistant to the president.
This will be Mital’s first role in the government, with all his prior experience coming from the private sector. Mital has over two decades of experience in the tech field and was most recently the CEO and founder of Kernel Labs, which focused on machine learning, virtual reality, and cybersecurity.
He had held his position at Kernel Labs since 2015 and concurrently served as a board member, advisor, or investor for a variety of since-acquired companies. Start-ups he invested in, is on the board for, or advises include Appsheet acquired by Google, Wise.io acquired by General Electronics, and S2 acquired by CloudFlare. Mital was also the initial investor in real estate company RedFin and among the initial round of investors in the app OfferUp.
Before the move to Kernel Labs, Mital was the chief technology officer at Symantec Corporation, where he oversaw the technology strategy for the cybersecurity company from 2013-15. While at Kernel, he was also the co-founder and chairman of the blockchain-based distributed identification platform Trusted Key, which was later acquired by Workday.
Mital’s longest-tenured job came at Microsoft, where he worked as a corporate vice president for 20 years, and as a general manager concurrently for seven years.
