Cloudburst Leadership

Evan Kohlmann, Founder + CEO

Evan Kohlmann is the founder and CEO of Tribeca-based Cloudburst Technologies, the premier provider of off-chain cyberintelligence for the financial sector. Dubbed "the Terrorist Search Engine" by New York Magazine, Kohlmann has worked for more than two decades tracking terrorist organizations and other cyber threat actors through their electronic communications. He holds an unusual combination of expertise both in the subject matter of intelligence analysis, as well as in building automated systems for data acquisition and distillation. Previously, Mr. Kohlmann founded cyberintelligence market leader Flashpoint from his own bedroom, wrote the original code, and played a key role in the management and capital fundraising.

Mr. Kohlmann has served at various times as a contract consultant on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) at the Hague, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the U.K. Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Scotland Yard's SO-15 Counter Terrorism Command, the Central Scotland Police, West Yorkshire Police, the Swiss Federal Public Prosecutor, and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET).

Michael O'Connor, COO + GC

Michael O’Connor is Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel at Cloudburst, where he oversees business operations and leads the company’s legal and risk strategy. He has guided companies through some of the most complex challenges in the cryptocurrency space.

Before joining Cloudburst, Mr. O’Connor served as Global Head of Litigation at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange. In that role, he counseled the Executive Team and Board on litigation and regulatory risk, engaged with client concerns, and worked with major stakeholders like investors and auditors. His tenure successfully resolved several high-profile matters. These include the SEC’s dismissal with prejudice of a landmark case challenging Kraken-traded tokens as securities, and the resolution of an OFAC enforcement action that acknowledged Kraken’s voluntary disclosure, cooperation, and significant remediation efforts.

Mr. O’Connor has also taught university-level courses on Cyber Law, including topics in Data Security and Privacy, Cybercrime, and Emerging Technology Law. Early in his career, he served as a law clerk to the Hon. D. Brooks Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Ben Turner, CTO

Ben Turner is Chief Technology Officer at Cloudburst. He leads the engineering, product, and data science teams and evaluates the technical and business viability of applications and products using AI, LLMs, data science, scraping, blockchains, and emerging protocols and communications platforms.

Mr. Turner has previously worked as a software engineer for employers in domains such as Web3/NFTs (Candy, a baseball card NFT company), cyber-threat intelligence (Flashpoint), television (The Colbert Report), streaming video (Vimeo), and advertising consulting (The Barbarian Group).

He is also a former watch analyst for a Department of Homeland Security contractor as well as a former US Army paratrooper and Arabic linguist/crypto-analyst working in Military Intelligence.