Marc Olesen

Chief Executive Officer Cofense

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Marc Olesen is Chief Executive Officer of Cofense, the Leesburg, Virginia company that builds phishing defence around the people who receive the email: training employees to recognise and report attacks, then using those reports and its own threat intelligence to find and remove malicious messages that have already slipped past email gateways. He took over in January 2025 after a career that has alternated between running security software businesses inside large companies and leading venture- and private-equity-backed firms as chief executive. That career includes cloud and SaaS general-manager roles at Splunk and McAfee, and the top job at Sift and at TokenEx, where he led the 2024 merger with IXOPAY.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of Cofense since January 2025.
• CEO of TokenEx from October 2022; named CEO of the combined IXOPAY, a TokenEx Company, when the two merged in April 2024.
• President and Chief Executive Officer of Sift, the digital trust and safety company.
• Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Solutions at Splunk, appointed in 2014.
• Senior Vice President and General Manager of McAfee’s SaaS Security Business Unit, announced by McAfee in early 2009.
• Also held executive leadership positions at Hewlett-Packard and Dynatrace.

Professional Journey

Olesen’s career spans more than 30 years in technology, much of it in security. Early in 2009 McAfee reported that it had appointed him senior vice president and general manager of its SaaS Security Business Unit, the part of the company delivering security as a hosted service rather than as installed software. In 2014 Splunk named him senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Solutions, responsible for building its cloud services. He also held executive leadership positions at Hewlett-Packard and Dynatrace.

He moved into the chief executive role at Sift, where as president and CEO he led the company’s positioning in what it called Digital Trust & Safety, fraud prevention for online businesses, and scaled it for a growing international customer base. In October 2022 he became CEO of TokenEx, an Edmond, Oklahoma cloud tokenization provider that had just raised a $100 million Series B from K1 Investment Management. In April 2024 TokenEx agreed to merge with IXOPAY, a European payment orchestration platform, and Olesen was named to lead the combined company, IXOPAY, a TokenEx Company, which paired payment-data tokenization with routing across multiple payment processors.

Cofense appointed him Chief Executive Officer in January 2025. The company’s thesis is that email remains the primary channel for attacks and that attackers are using AI to make phishing faster, more personalised and more varied, so that pattern-based filtering alone misses too much. Under Olesen it has emphasised machine learning, real-time threat intelligence and adaptive employee training, and what he describes as compressing the “automation gap” between attackers and defenders with both AI and a trained human layer.

Education

No education record was found in the sources reviewed.