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Cohere names AISLE co-founder Jaya Baloo its first CISO

Jaya Baloo has joined Cohere as its first chief information security officer after co-founding cybersecurity company AISLE. Her appointment follows Cohere’s proposed agreement to acquire AISLE and establish a cybersecurity business.

AI.info Team · · fact-checked · against 2 sources ↓ · Published 13 Nov 2026

Jaya Baloo has joined Cohere as its first chief information security officer, taking a role focused on the company’s security strategy for enterprise AI. The appointment, disclosed in a Cohere post on November 12, brings the co-founder of cybersecurity company AISLE to the AI developer after it proposed acquiring her company.

Baloo will help shape security strategy as Cohere builds a platform combining AI models, agentic applications, deployment infrastructure and cybersecurity capabilities. The company says its approach is intended to let organizations run AI where their data resides while retaining control over security and governance.

Security leadership

Baloo previously served as chief information security officer at Rapid7, Avast and KPN Telecom. Her advisory work has included the World Economic Forum and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, known as EC3.

Her work has covered cyber resilience, critical infrastructure security, vulnerability management and quantum readiness. Cohere says she brings more than two decades of experience protecting critical systems and advising organizations.

In a statement accompanying her appointment, Baloo said security and trust need to be built into AI from the start as the technology becomes part of critical infrastructure. She said she would work on enabling organizations to deploy AI while maintaining control, resilience and security.

AISLE and the proposed deal

She co-founded AISLE with Ondrej Vlcek and Stanislav Fort. Founded in 2024, AISLE developed AI systems designed to discover, validate and help remediate previously unknown vulnerabilities in production software.

In its first year out of stealth, AISLE discovered more than 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities assigned CVEs across more than 100 codebases, according to Cohere. Those included all 12 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL’s January security release and 18 of the 24 CVEs in curl’s latest release, the company said in its October announcement.

Cohere announced a proposed agreement to acquire AISLE on October 15.

Other leadership plans

The company also outlined roles for AISLE’s other founders. Vlcek was to become senior vice president of Cohere Cyber and lead the cybersecurity business, while Baloo was to lead security across the company.

Stanislav Fort was to become vice president of AI security, joining model research and training efforts and leading AI security research. Cohere also plans a long-term investment in Prague, expanding AISLE’s presence there and establishing the city as its global center for AI cybersecurity and autonomous security systems.

The proposed combination is intended to support deployments in private cloud, on-premises and fully air-gapped environments, according to the October announcement. Cohere said it expected the combined capabilities to improve areas including governance, monitoring and observability for AI agents and protection of sensitive organizational data.