About
“We know what passes security review because we've spent years on both sides: breaking in, and deciding who gets through.”
01Our story
Chad NelsonCo-Founder & Head of Business DevelopmentWe spent years breaking into systems professionally. Red teams at Fortune 500s. Penetration tests where we found the vulnerabilities that keep security leaders up at night. We know what attackers prioritize because we have operated like them, finding the cheapest path to your most valuable assets.
Then we went inside enterprise security organizations: Capital One, Okta, Bishop Fox. We ran the vendor evaluations. We decided who passed and who didn't. We learned what buyers are actually looking for (and how little it correlates with compliance checklists).
Then we went to the sell side. Suddenly we were filling out questionnaires, scrambling to find someone credible for a buyer call, watching deals stall because we couldn't tell the security story well enough.
That's when it clicked: the companies that struggle aren't less secure. They just don't know what enterprise buyers want to hear, or what real security actually looks like. We know both. So we started Adversis.
02Leadership
The people who scope your engagement are the people who do the work. No handoffs to a junior bench.
Co-Founder & PrincipalOffensive security expert from Capital One, Okta, and Bishop Fox with deep experience in penetration testing, compliance frameworks, and security program buildout. Author of Metasploit and Hashcat modules with CVE discoveries including Adobe Acrobat sandbox escapes. OSCP, OSCE, GXPN certified.
Co-Founder & Head of Business DevelopmentBrings the enterprise buyer's perspective to vendor security conversations and has sweated the vendor procurement process for over $20M+ in enterprise deals. An operational excellence background (Lean Six Sigma Black Belt) from Toyota, Michael Foods, and Land O'Lakes translates to efficient, outcome-focused consulting engagements.
AdvisorLeads vendor security architecture, AI governance, and red teams at a $5B automotive technology company. Creator of the Red Team Maturity Model used by Fortune 200 companies. Background includes Symantec and LifeLock, with published CVE discoveries and open-source tools referenced in SANS training.
03Our experience
Red Team Maturity Model
Created the framework now used by Fortune 200 companies to assess and build red team programs.
Published research
CVE discoveries including ForeScout and Adobe Acrobat sandbox escapes.
Operational experience
Combined decades of building programs, penetration testing, and red team operations at Capital One, Okta, Bishop Fox, and others.
Certs that matter
OSCP, OSCE, GXPN: the ones that require you to actually break in, not just pass a multiple-choice exam.
04Recognition
World class certifications, with research and tools highlighted in leading publications.
05Our journey
We didn't start as consultants. We started as practitioners: running security programs, breaking into systems, deciding which vendors passed. Then we brought that experience to companies that needed it.
2019
We'd spent years breaking into some of the most compliant organizations in the world: companies with eight- and nine-figure security budgets, every regulation and compliance regime you can name, mature programs by any standard measure. And we kept getting in. Something was missing between what compliance checked and what actually stopped attackers. Adversis started there.
2023
Healthcare, manufacturing, professional services: organizations with real compliance pressure and no internal security team. But we didn't just run standard assessments. We threat modeled their businesses. We looked at who had admin access and how they operated. We wrote recommendations that would actually get implemented, not just documented.
2024
Founders preparing to sell upmarket started calling. They were hitting the walls we'd seen from the buyer's side: security questionnaires that stumped their teams, SOC 2 audits blocking deals, enterprise buyers asking architecture questions nobody could answer. We started closing those gaps. Deals that had stalled started moving again.
2025
We went deeper with VC-backed SaaS. Pen tests scoped to what enterprise buyers actually scrutinize. Fractional CISO support for founders who needed a credible voice on calls. Questionnaire responses that held up because they reflected real controls, not just policy language.
2026
Today we work with VC-backed SaaS companies across the country, including repeat clients and recognizable names in Silicon Valley. Our NPS is 10 out of 10. The approach hasn't changed: security grounded in what we've seen actually exploited, delivered in a way that helps you close the deals you're after.
06Our values
Security can feel overwhelming. We meet clients where they are, make complexity manageable, and leave teams more confident than we found them.
Our risk models come from years of offensive operations: what attackers actually exploit, how they chain findings together, where the cheap wins are. This calibrates everything.
We treat your time and trust seriously. Fast responses, clear communication, and follow-through on what we say we'll do.
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And how to reach it. Tell us what's in front of you, and we'll scope what you actually need.
“Most companies don't need more security. They need the right security at the right time. We figure out what that is.”
