Natalya Ivanovna Kasperskaya is a Russian IT businesswoman, president of the InfoWatch group of companies, co-founder, and former CEO of the software company Kaspersky Lab.
Natalya Kasperskaya was born on February 5, 1966 in Moscow into a family of engineers and employees of the Soviet defense research institute. As a young woman, she was fond of sports and was interested in veterinary medicine, but she gave up studying the career due to the difficulties she had to study chemistry.
In high school, Natalya transferred to a school of physics and mathematics run by the Moscow Aviation Institute.
Natalya tried to enter Lomonosov Moscow State University, but she did not stay by half a point. In her place, she entered the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics. During her studies at the Moscow institute, she met her first husband Eugene Kaspersky, whom she married in 1986.
After graduating from the institute, Natalya was assigned to the Central Office of Science and Construction in Moscow, where she worked for half a year as a research scientist before taking maternity leave. Natalya began her career in IT at the age of 28, when she took a job, in January 1994, as a salesperson for a computer software and accessories company with a monthly salary of $ 50.
Natalya created the Kaspersky Lab foundation in June 1997, where she served as CEO for more than 10 years. In August 2007, Natalya was removed from office and suspended from her key managerial duties by Eugene Kaspersky due to the couple’s divorce. At the time of the energy switch in 2007, annual sales revenue had reached $ 126 million, while the company had an estimated capitalization of more than $ 1.3 billion and annual revenue of $ 700 million in 2011, when Natalya sold your remaining stake and left. Following the change in management, the company’s growth rate visibly slowed, with global revenue growth of 40% in 2009, 13.7% in 2011, 3% in 2012 and 6% in 2013.
With her partner’s separation agreement, Natalya became the owner of InfoWatch, and made her main investments in ‘InfoWatch’, ‘Kribrum’ and ‘Nanosemantics’, jointly owned by her and Igor Ashmanov, and ‘G Data Software’ AG, a German antivirus company.
The ‘InfoWatch’ software had only vague prospects at the time of the spin-off. Unlike ‘Kaspersky Lab’, the new company’s technology solutions and product line were initially aimed at large and medium-sized businesses, starting with 300 workstations, rather than small businesses and retailers. In 2012 InfoWatch posted its first revenue and continued to grow at an annual rate of 60-70 percent.
Natalya Kasperskaya is a board member of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Russia and the Association of Software Developers ‘Home Software’. She is also a member of the Council of Russian Software Experts affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Telecommunications and Mass Communications, the Skolkovo Foundation Grants Committee, and the supervisory board of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech).
