Mikko Valimaki

As CTO and Founder of Needle, Mikko Valimaki has been leading the charge to build the most innovative solution that powers online engagements for some of the largest eccomerce websites globally, helping customers buy everything from cruises to hand bags. Mikko has a long history of building scalable server side solutions for commerce, communication and security. Before co-founding Needle, Mikko was the Chief Scientist at Blue Coat Systems (Nasdaq: BCSI), where he architected the cloud-based content filtering and malware protection solution. Additionally Mikko served as the technology spokesperson for the security and WAN optimization solutions. Mikko was the CTO of Cerberian prior to its Blue Coat acquisition and was the VP of Engineering at Novell where he directed all aspects of the development of Novell eDirectory, DirXML and other value-added security and identity management solutions. Originally from Finland, Mikko now enjoys the mountains of Utah for cross-country skiing and mountain biking. Mikko is quadrilingual and has a keen interest in natural language processing. Mikko studied at Brigham Young University, earning both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science.