Rajesh Khazanchi

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder ColorTokens

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Rajesh Khazanchi is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of ColorTokens, a San Jose, California cybersecurity company whose Xshield platform provides microsegmentation, the practice of fencing off individual workloads, devices and users so that an attacker who gets in cannot move freely across a network. He took over as CEO in April 2021 from fellow co-founder Nitin Mehta, who moved to Executive Chairman, having spent the earlier part of his career leading product teams at VMware, BMC, HP and Oracle. Under his leadership the company has positioned itself around “breach readiness” across IT, operational technology, cloud and container environments, and was named a Leader in Forrester’s microsegmentation evaluation in 2024 and again in the third quarter of 2026.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder of ColorTokens, and its Chief Executive Officer since April 2021.
• Quoted as CEO and co-founder in ColorTokens’ August 2026 announcement of its Leader placement in The Forrester Wave, Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026.
• Led ColorTokens’ September 2024 acquisition of PureID, adding identity-based segmentation to the Xshield platform.
• Previously led product teams at VMware, BMC, HP and Oracle.
• Awarded six patents for innovations in cloud automation and cybersecurity.

Professional Journey

Khazanchi built his career on the product side of enterprise infrastructure software, leading product teams at Oracle, HP, BMC and VMware. That run coincided with the shift he has since described in interviews: networks and storage moving from rigid, hardware-centric systems to virtualised, software-defined ones. Security, in his account, lagged that change, and the gap was the opportunity behind ColorTokens: security that holds regardless of which application runs where, on which cloud or data centre, and from where the user connects. Across those roles he was awarded six patents in cloud automation and cybersecurity.

He co-founded ColorTokens around 2015 on a “trust nothing, verify everything” premise, building zero-trust segmentation software delivered as a service. In April 2021 the company announced that he had been appointed Chief Executive Officer, with co-founder and previous CEO Nitin Mehta remaining as Executive Chairman of the board.

As CEO he has narrowed the company’s pitch to microsegmentation and what it calls breach readiness: limiting how far an intrusion can spread, rather than assuming it can be prevented outright. In September 2024 ColorTokens acquired PureID, a passwordless authentication and identity-access startup, to bring identity-based segmentation into Xshield, an announcement that closely followed its naming as a Leader in Forrester’s Q3 2024 microsegmentation evaluation. It repeated that placement in The Forrester Wave, Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026, where Khazanchi framed the case in terms of AI giving attackers more speed and scale, and of closing “the gap between detection and containment.”

Education

No education record was found in the sources reviewed.