Jonathan Dambrot

Jonathan Dambrot is co-founder and chief executive of Cranium, an AI security company in Short Hills, New Jersey, that spun out of KPMG’s venture studio in 2023. Before Cranium he built the third-party risk company Prevalent and was a KPMG partner leading third-party security services worldwide.

Magic tricks and chocolate

His first business was magic. As a high school student he manufactured three magic tricks, sold them around the world and performed on weekends. “It’s how I paid for college,” he said on the Jersey Tech and Innovation podcast. He collected magic books, some about 150 years old, to find tricks nobody else knew.

In college he ran a chocolate business. His grandfather was a chocolatier in New York City, trained in Switzerland, whose chocolates won critics’ rankings year after year, and Dambrot studied with him. “I learned a critical skill from him. I learned a lot about business,” he said. He sold the business and went to graduate school.

Prevalent and KPMG

After graduate school he started Prevalent, which grew into an industry leader in third-party risk management before its sale to Insight Venture Partners in late 2016, according to a Unite.AI interview. He handed over the chief executive role in 2019 and joined KPMG as a partner working on third-party security and AI security.

Spinning Cranium out of KPMG

He had the idea in June 2021. “We were building and delivering AI-powered solutions for some of our largest clients, and I found that we were doing nothing to secure them against adversarial threats,” he told Unite.AI. When he asked security chiefs at those clients, many said their teams had never spoken to their data scientists. “Fundamentally, data scientists don’t understand the cybersecurity risks of AI and cyber professionals don’t understand data science the way they understand other topics in technology,” he told TechCrunch. KPMG Studio incubated the company with co-founders Felix Knoll and Paul Spicer, and it became independent in March 2023.