KnowBe4 names Andrew Kanzer as Chief Growth Officer

KnowBe4 has appointed Andrew Kanzer as Chief Growth Officer, adding him to the cybersecurity company's leadership team after senior roles at Xero, Intuit and PayPal.

Reporting to Chief Executive Officer Bryan Palma, Kanzer will oversee KnowBe4's global go-to-market strategy. The role is designed to bring together sales and other commercial functions as the company expands across international markets.

His appointment brings another senior fintech executive into the cybersecurity sector at a time when software groups are seeking leaders with experience scaling global operations. Kanzer has spent more than two decades developing growth and sales models for large software businesses.

Most recently, he was Managing Director at cloud accounting software company Xero. Earlier, he led Intuit's mid-market and financial services sales organisations and served as Vice President, Global SMB and Mid Market Sales at PayPal.

Those roles gave Kanzer experience across accounting software, financial technology and payments, as well as managing sales teams across multiple regions. That background is expected to support KnowBe4's efforts to sharpen commercial execution and enter new markets.

Leadership move

KnowBe4 is best known for security awareness training and attack simulation tools that help businesses train staff against phishing and other social engineering threats. It has broadened its offering to include security tools for both human users and AI agents, reflecting a wider shift in how cybersecurity vendors define workplace risk.

KnowBe4 says it serves more than 70,000 organisations worldwide. Its products include training, collaboration security and agent security, alongside a risk-scoring system built on behavioural data gathered over 15 years.

Palma described Kanzer as a leader with a record of driving growth inside large organisations.

"Andrew has spent his career proving that global organisations can grow with the speed and disruption of a startup," said Bryan Palma, Chief Executive Officer at KnowBe4. "His relentless drive and operational vision will be key as we extend our market leadership position."

Kanzer said the company was well placed in a market being reshaped by AI and cyber risk.

"The intersection of human behaviour, AI agents, and cybersecurity is the most exciting frontier in tech today," said Andrew Kanzer, Chief Growth Officer at KnowBe4. "KnowBe4 is already the market leader, and I look forward to leveraging data-driven sales architectures and innovative go-to-market strategies to help organisations globally secure their digital workforces."

Market context

The appointment comes as security software companies adapt their products and sales strategies to the spread of generative AI and automated software agents in the workplace. Vendors are increasingly framing cyber risk as a mix of employee behaviour, machine activity and collaboration tools, creating pressure to rethink both product design and commercial positioning.

For KnowBe4, hiring an executive with a background in software expansion and sales operations suggests a focus on commercial discipline as much as product messaging. Kanzer's earlier roles point to experience taking established software businesses into new customer segments and building sales structures around broader platform offerings rather than single products.

That could matter as cybersecurity providers compete for larger contracts and try to sell across a wider set of business functions. Buyers are under pressure to manage phishing, insider risk, AI misuse and collaboration security within the same budget cycle, pushing vendors to present more unified offerings.

Kanzer now takes on that task at a company that built its name on training workers to recognise threats but is seeking a broader role in digital workforce security.