Varun Anand

Since May 2026

A security control plane for agentic AI.

Metano gives an organisation a way to see and govern every AI agent operating inside it — first-party, third-party, and the ones employees bring to their own machines. Discover what is running, watch what it does, detect when it goes wrong, put guardrails in front of it, and stop it when that is the right answer.

It is built to be self-hosted and minimum-privilege: the data does not leave, and the system asks for the least access that will do the job. I own product, and I run India.

DiscoverMonitorDetect GuardrailsBlock

How I work

Engineer by training. Product management by choice.

Category creation

ITDR, deception and identity attack-surface management taken from nothing to a real market — including the industry’s first AI and ML use cases in both categories.

Strategy with a P&L

Roadmap, pricing, packaging and monetisation judged by the number at the end of it. Margins, NRR and win rates, not slideware.

Technical credibility

Firewalls, intrusion prevention, Wi-Fi, AIX internals and TCP/IP stacks — written, not merely managed. Engineering gets an argument, not a requirement.

Building in India

Leading directors, managers, PMs and designers across geographies, and standing up the India organisation behind a distributed company.

Track record

Things that were true and can be checked.

$0 → $100M

product line grown from nothing over five years at Attivo, then SentinelOne

6 of 10

of the Fortune 10 run products I have owned

400%

growth in net new customer count from category-creating products

120%

net revenue retention, driven by pricing and packaging changes

−50% → +10%

portfolio margin turnaround, with a path to 65% unburdened

a week → an hour

proof-of-concept time for net new customers; win rates above 90%

$2.5M

ARR inside three quarters for an AI SecOps agent I ideated and launched

$100M+

contributed to Sophos revenue, growing 80% year on year across 45,000+ customers

Experience

Twenty years, in order.

May 2026 — now

Head of Product & India

Metano

Product ownership for an agentic-AI security control plane: discovery, monitoring, detection, guardrails and blocking, across first-party, third-party and employee-side AI.
Self-hosted and minimum-privilege by design. Building and running the India organisation.

Sep 2024 — May 2026

Fractional Chief Product Officer

Cybersecurity and AI startups, India

Advising and operating as fractional CPO for early- to growth-stage companies, sharpening product–market fit, pricing and go-to-market.
AI SecOps: curated product vision and GTM for an AI-native security operations platform; ideated and launched an agent that grew to $2.5M ARR in under three quarters.
Threat intelligence: overhauled pricing and packaging to make the line channel-ready, landing marquee partners and moving margins from −50% to +10%.
Identity security: brought category-creation experience from ITDR and deception to differentiate in a crowded market; introduced NHI and agent-identity plays.
Policy as code: product strategy and positioning for a Kubernetes-native policy engine.

Dec 2018 — Sep 2024

Senior Director, Product Line Management

SentinelOne (acquired Attivo Networks)

Owned PLM, positioning and product–market fit for the ThreatDefend platform: ITDR, deception and ID-ASM.
Launched new categories and grew the line from $0 to $1M to $10M, and onward past $100M over five years.
Industry-first AI and ML use cases for ITDR and deception — LLM-based threat prioritisation, discovery, remediation and automation.
Zero technical loss from proof-of-concept stage across both category-creating product lines.
Member of the senior strategy team alongside company VPs and SVPs.

Jul 2016 — Sep 2017

Product Director

Sophos Technologies

Led central management and reporting strategy for the Network Security Group, contributing $100M+ to a $700M+ company and growing 80% year on year across 45,000+ customers.
Built the cloud and SaaS vision, and the developer programme behind a platform-and-marketplace strategy.

Sep 2012 — Jun 2016

Senior Manager, Product Management

Arista Networks (acquired Mojo Networks)

Defined industry-first use cases across retail, insurance and telecom, contributing 40% of revenue and outpacing industry growth.
Location services and CRM/marketing cloud integrations for customer behaviour analytics, store design and campaign management.
Partner, OEM and ODM relationships, analyst and executive briefings, pricing and monetisation strategy.

Jul 2002 — Sep 2012

Engineering roles across multiple companies

Cisco Systems · GainSpan · iPolicy Networks · IBM Software Labs · HCL · C-DOT

Cisco: MSRPC ALG support in ISR firewalls, and IOS firewall / WAAS interoperability.
iPolicy: network anti-virus and anti-spam for the UTM appliance.
IBM: AIX on p-series — Workload Manager, JFS2, RAS and virtualization.
C-DOT: ported the TCP/IP stack onto CDOS, C-DOT’s real-time operating system.

Beyond the day job

Advisory, education, languages.

IDC Technical Advisory Panel

Member.

GuidePoint thought leadership network