Leadership

Christian Montessori founded Artorias to build intelligence systems for the defense and intelligence communities. He comes from open source intelligence and predictive systems, and still engineers much of the core infrastructure himself.

Drake Arnott co-founded Artorias and runs its strategy and operations, including its path into defense markets. His background is in business management and corporate governance. He sits on the advisory board of 47G, Utah's aerospace and defense association, where commercial technology meets defense requirements.

Stefano Ritondale co-founded Artorias and leads its intelligence team. A former U.S. Army intelligence officer and an intelligence planner at KBR, he brings decades of geopolitical and tactical experience. He appears often in international media on national security.

Charlie Coppinger designs every Artorias product with Christian Montessori and oversees the architecture and security of its software. A full-stack developer and fractional C-suite advisor, he is also a Codex Ambassador for OpenAI, forward deployed to understand the new threats that artificial intelligence poses.

Jonathan Duprat leads Artorias' international expansion, partnerships and defense sales. A graduate of The Leadership, Diplomacy and National Security Lab, he knows Washington and the international diplomatic world. His work has taken him to Montenegro and Kosovo, and to Japan on a United Nations contract.

Derek Montagu connects strategy to execution at Artorias and makes sure every team has the context to move fast. He served in the United States Marine Corps, where he specialized in expeditionary logistics and completed two combat deployments to Afghanistan.

Robert Jenkins spent 20 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, leading operations, personnel and cyber programs. From 2014 to 2021 he held executive roles at BAE Systems, NCI and Leidos across intelligence, defense and cyber. A former Army infantry and special operations officer who also worked on Wall Street, he built and taught a graduate course on asymmetric threats at Johns Hopkins University and now teaches at the University of Wyoming. He sits on the boards of several companies and nonprofits.

Kimberly Cheatle was the 27th Director of the U.S. Secret Service, responsible for its protective and investigative missions and a workforce of more than 8,000. Before that she was Assistant Director of the Office of Protective Operations, directing its operational units and the Technical Security Division. She also led investigative field offices and agency-wide training, and served on two protective details. She later served as Senior Director of Global Security at PepsiCo and Managing Director of the Shelter Cove Company.

Jeanne Benincasa Thorpe was appointed Massachusetts Undersecretary of Homeland Security by two governors of opposing parties. From 2018 to 2023 she was the Commonwealth's senior advisor on homeland security. She developed the state's first Homeland Security Strategy and first Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan, and directed its COVID-19 response across more than 150 agencies. She founded the National Security and Resiliency Division at Nixon Peabody LLP, is a Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and is Founder and CEO of RESIQOR Advisors.

Kamron Palizban co-founded Invisible Technologies and helped take it from zero to $100 million in annual recurring revenue and unicorn status. Invisible now runs operations and AI training for some of the best-known companies in the world. He is co-founder and CEO of Ascendancy, which applies the network strategy that built Invisible, pairing AI pattern matching with relationships. He is based in New York.

Teddy Raskin co-founded Ukraine Friends and Israel Friends under the Worldwide Friends Foundation, which has delivered more than $110 million in lifesaving medical aid and defense equipment. He works closely with leadership in both countries on rapidly evolving threats and needs on the ground, and his supply chains have put advanced medical kits, protective vehicle systems and reconnaissance technology in the hands of units in the field. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Simpli and built and sold his first company, KOA Supply. At Artorias, he makes key introductions and helps drive growth.

Mark Leff is a go-to-market and cybersecurity leader who has built cloud-aligned services and partner programs at Everpure, Exclusive Networks, Cisco, Juniper and Fidelis Security. At Exclusive Networks he doubled services revenue in support of threefold overall growth. At Cisco he launched Combined Services with more than $4 billion in first-year bookings and grew Network Optimization Services from $600 million to more than $1 billion in a year. He guides teams on value selling, cloud economics, FinOps and modern cyber service models, and serves on two nonprofit advisory boards.