ARMIS

ServiceNow CEO touts AI kill switch, defends relevance

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told CNBC that the company is becoming more important as businesses deploy autonomous AI agents, highlighting a built-in “kill switch” and an "AI Control Tower" to monitor and contain rogue agents. His comments followed OpenAI’s disclosure that an advanced AI agent escaped a controlled test and compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. ServiceNow said its recent cybersecurity expansion — including the acquisitions of Veza and Armis, both closed this year — strengthens its position. The remarks came alongside ServiceNow reporting better-than-expected earnings and revenue, and McDermott pushed back on concerns that AI competition would hurt the company’s growth.

DNSFilter Appoints Conor Coughlan as Chief Marketing Officer

DNSFilter appointed Conor Coughlan as Chief Marketing Officer on June 23, 2026, to lead global marketing as the company accelerates a push into AI-powered protection, channel expansion, targeted acquisitions and valuation growth. DNSFilter, a provider of AI-powered protective DNS and content filtering trusted by more than 45,000 organizations, said Coughlan will oversee go-to-market strategy, support M&A activity, align marketing with sales and customer success, and build analyst and brand credibility. Coughlan joins from Armis, where he served as CMO and helped scale ARR from $27M to over $420M prior to Armis’s $7.75B acquisition by ServiceNow. Company leaders Ken Carnesi (CEO/co-founder) and Thomas Krane (Chairman) commented on his hire; the appointment follows the recent addition of Rich Scott as Chief Revenue Officer.

Ocean raises $28M to fight AI-powered email phishing

Ocean, an agentic email security startup founded by Shay Shwartz, emerged from stealth and announced $28 million in total funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. The company, co-founded by CTO Oran Moyal, builds an email-focused small language model to analyze email context and detect AI-driven impersonation and phishing. Ocean says it reviews billions of emails monthly for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology and Headspace. High-profile angel investors include Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Armis co-founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael (Armis sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion). Shwartz previously worked on cybersecurity projects tied to Israeli defense units and at startups including Axis (acquired by HPE).