Dave Wajsgras grew up around engineers. His father spent years at Grumman before moving to NASA, where he became the lead power systems engineer for the Hubble Space Telescope. So it wasn’t strange that Wajsgras was comfortable talking about space and aerospace long before he had to decide what to study.
Then he picked accounting.
“When I started in college, I actually started out majoring in math,” he says. “A few friends talked me into looking at the business school, and I realized after undergrad, if I wanted to start my career and then potentially do something else academically, it was a lot easier to go the accounting route.”
So he did, and minored in economics. He’d later get an MBA in finance from American University. But the technical world he grew up in never let go.
Over 25 years across commercial and defense companies, Wajsgras kept ending up beside the engineers. Today, he runs Everfox, a cybersecurity company that moves data between different domains and classification levels while protecting it from compromise.
How he got there isn’t really a story of chance. Wajsgras keeps getting called back to companies he already knows, and Everfox is the clearest case yet.
A Career That Circled Back
The pattern started early. Even in his 20s and 30s, Wajsgras kept landing at technology companies, close to the engineers and the technical folks.
“It was easier than you might think for me to understand the technology,” he said, which he credits to growing up in a family of engineers.
At Raytheon, where he spent nearly 15 years, the numbers background and the technical pull eventually converged. He served as senior vice president and chief financial officer, then went on to run the company’s Intelligence, Information and Services business, which developed advanced work in cybersecurity, space, defense and intelligence. The accountant ended up running one of Raytheon’s most technically advanced businesses.
Wajsgras retired from Raytheon in 2020 and spent a year as a partner at Pine Island Capital Partners, a middle-market private equity firm. Then, Intelsat, the satellite communications company, reached out, an obvious fit given the space work he’d overseen at Raytheon.
As CEO, he led its evolution from a wholesale broadband capacity provider to an end-to-end managed services business. He ran Intelsat for about three and a half years and sold it in July 2025. Then he retired, for the second time.
“This time, I really was retired,” he says. “It was not a head fake.”
But one day, the phone rang. TPG was calling about a cybersecurity company called Everfox, formerly the government business tied to Forcepoint. Wajsgras had overseen the acquisitions of those same cyber businesses years earlier at Raytheon, since sold to private equity.
“Roll the reel forward 12 years, and three of those businesses are what I’m overseeing today,” he says.
Neither job came from a search. After his first retirement, Wajsgras was investing but not looking.
“I wasn’t reaching out to anyone or dealing with any executive recruiting firms,” he says. Both calls came because people already knew him. The Intelsat team knew him from Raytheon, and when that company sold, TPG came around.
By the time they explained what Everfox was, he already knew it. He’d built it at Raytheon and knew most of the people there. He took the role of chairman and CEO in January 2026.
What Everfox Does
Everfox builds the technology that lets networks at different security levels share data without exposing any of them. The Herndon, Virginia, company employs over 1,000 people and traces its work back over 25 years to its days as Raytheon Cyber Solutions business and subsequently renamed Forcepoint. Wajsgras splits what it does into two parts.
The first one is cross-domain solutions, a complex platform of capabilities that allows networks to safely “talk” to each other domestically or internationally. They can move data between classification levels, from top-secret networks down to the open internet and back, with a number of networks in between. The point is to move information securely, without breaching classification rules and with essentially no risk of malware working its way into the system.
“It’s the highest-end cybersecurity platform available anywhere in the world,” Wajsgras says.
The second area is insider threat. As Wajsgras puts it, the goal is “keeping folks who may or may not be inside of a company or enterprise that are contemplating nefarious acts from successfully doing those type of things.” Everfox’s platform, EverShield, does that by monitoring user activity for early signs of risk, unauthorized access, misuse — the kind of behavior that comes before a leak. The tools are built to catch both deliberate and accidental threats while protecting the privacy of the employees being watched.
Both jobs, cross-domain and insider threat, have gotten harder with the rise of AI. The same tools that help defenders also hand attackers faster ways to break in and stay hidden.
“Everything’s gotten a lot more complicated in this world of artificial intelligence,” he says. “But our technology is so advanced, it’s one of the few companies in the world that can effectively guard against the AI threat.”
The Threat Nobody Leads With
Ask Wajsgras what isn’t getting enough attention, and he points to the architecture problem. At some point in the not-too-distant future, he says, AI will make most of the cybersecurity architectures that organizations rely on, in business and government alike, obsolete.
“That’s the biggest risk I believe people aren’t talking about enough,” he says. “Some are talking about it, but it’s not the top line of the conversation, and it really should be, because this is happening at a much faster pace than anyone would have anticipated.”
He’s quick to add that AI isn’t the villain. It’s a revolutionary technology that will do a lot of good. But like every technology before it, it draws bad actors, and that’s what worries him. The conversation, he says, isn’t spending enough time on what needs to be done from a cyber defense standpoint.
For the Pentagon specifically, Wajsgras says AI changes the entire mission set. It reshapes the front end of the mission — intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — and how kinetic and non-kinetic warfare is conducted. Used the right way, which he believes it is, it gives the U.S. an advantage in a fight. From what he’s seen and what’s public about current and recent operations, AI has already delivered that edge.
The risk comes from going too far. He doesn’t think that’s happening or that it will, but the line he draws is clear.
“If we got out over our ski tips and started to let the technology fully replace humans in the loop, that’s where the risk comes in,” Wajsgras says.
The Dream Job He Didn’t Get
Growing up with three brothers, Wajsgras played three sports and spent a while convinced he’d be a Division I athlete. The summer of 11th grade ended that. He was playing baseball alongside two guys who went on to play professionally, and he thought he matched them.
“I wasn’t even close,” he says. “I realized that summer I just can’t compete with those guys. They’re a different level.”
Wajsgras also considered the military, the path his father had started on in the Air Force, before opting for college. But the ultimate dream was running a baseball team.
“The ship has sailed,” he says, but being the general manager of a professional team was the job he always pictured. He’s still a big sports fan.
A close second was working on cutting-edge technology. That one played out.
These days, the time he protects is for family. He and his wife have three adult children, all married. Two grandchildren, with three more coming by December. He tries to be on the golf course at least once a week and reads history, Civil War and World War II. And he still drills down on a subject until he hits the bottom of it, same as he always has.
