Hank Thomas

Hank Thomas is a Venture Capital investor, founder, and CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures (SCV). SCV is a Washington, DC based venture capital firm investing in the future of security, resiliency, and privacy. Growing up in a military family, Hank has had security in his blood since day one. Commissioned an Army Intelligence officer in 1997, Hank served in tactical, operational, and strategic positions on active duty until 2005, culminating with a role integrating NSA technology and capabilities with global military requirements. Much of what Hank helped build in the early 2000s was the precursor to today’s Army and U.S. Cyber Commands. Hank continued to build cyber capabilities as a consultant and executive at Booz Allen Hamilton for a decade, where he scaled massive government and commercial sector cybersecurity and intelligence programs. Hank founded SCV in 2016 - driven to build scalable security technology products that could keep up with the world's rapidly evolving threats. He designed SCV to bring an expert, less assuming, and more modern approach to VC, matching real world security requirements to the startup founders and companies solving them. Hank serves as a member of the board of directors for many of his portfolio companies and on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) advisory board. Hank is also the Co-Founder of SCVX (NYSE:SCVX), a national security-focused Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation (SPAC) that announced a deal in May of 2021 to acquire San Francisco based Bright Machines at a pro forma enterprise value of $1.1 billion and a post-transaction equity value of $1.6 billion. Ongoing supply chain disruptions, compounded by pandemic-induced factory closures and labor shortages, and increasing tensions around global security, trade, and tariffs, have turned global manufacturing on its head, which is what attracted Hank to Bright Machines. Recently, Hank has expanded his VC investment thesis to match rapidly evolving threats to our national security, critical infrastructure, and personal freedom. SCV has made several recent investments into technology companies engineering censorship-resistant encryption platforms for building businesses on the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is a "layer 2" payment protocol on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that allows for new ways to securely transport and host data while ensuring unfettered access, equity for intellectual property creators, and operational integrity. With his scope of investment rapidly expanding into new forms of security and internet technology, expect more of the unexpected from Hank and his team at SCV.