Former Maltego CTO joins as Unit 221B expands its leadership team and advances the next phase of its cybercrime intelligence platform

NEW YORK, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Unit 221B, the cybercrime intelligence company helping enterprises, financial institutions, law enforcement, and government agencies understand, investigate and disrupt cybercriminal networks, today announced the appointment of Ben April as Chief Technology Officer.

April joins Unit 221B at a pivotal moment for the company. As cybercriminal organizations become increasingly global and sophisticated, demand for Unit 221B’s technology and expertise continues to expand across domestic and international markets.

As CTO, April will lead the company’s technology strategy, engineering organization, and product development. His appointment reflects Unit 221B’s next phase of growth as it expands its leadership team and accelerates product development. His new role also supports Unit 221B’s broader strategy to expand internationally and continue investing in AI and agentic capabilities that advance investigations.

“Over the past decade, we’ve built one of the industry’s deepest threat intelligence capabilities by working alongside enterprises, governments, and law enforcement to understand how fast cybercrime is evolving and changing,” said May Chen-Contino, CEO of Unit 221B. “Today, we’re at an inflection point where demand is accelerating faster than ever before. Ben has spent his career building and using technology that empowers investigators, making him the ideal leader to help us scale that expertise into the next generation of our platform.”

April joins Unit 221B after nearly four years as Chief Technology Officer at Maltego, where he led engineering through a period of significant product evolution, expanded data models, and developed new capabilities that helped investigators uncover complex relationships across digital investigations. Over the course of his professional life, he has built and scaled investigation technologies used by cybersecurity professionals and investigators worldwide.

“I’ve spent my career building technology that helps investigators uncover the truth. What drew me to Unit 221B was the opportunity to work alongside one of the industry’s most experienced threat intelligence teams and help scale that expertise through technology. By combining deep operational knowledge, proprietary intelligence, and ambitious product vision, we can build something together that fundamentally changes how organizations investigate and disrupt cybercriminals,” said Ben April.

Built on more than a decade of operational threat intelligence expertise, Unit 221B has turned fragmented digital evidence and high-signal criminal communications into actionable intelligence, helping investigators identify relationships between threat actors, accelerate investigations, and disrupt criminal activity.

April’s appointment will further Unit 221B’s broader strategy to expand internationally and continue investing in AI-enabled and agentic capabilities that advance investigations. By partnering intelligent automation with the company’s deep domain expertise that has differentiated it since its founding, Unit 221B aims to help customers dismantle cybercriminal networks at greater speed, efficiency, and scale and ultimately create a safer digital and physical world.

About Unit 221B

Unit 221B builds technology that stops cybercrime. Our flagship platform, eWitness, transforms billions of high-signal messages from criminal communications into actionable intelligence, enabling enterprises, law enforcement, and government agencies to detect, investigate, and disrupt threats at scale. Combined with an elite team of threat intelligence experts, ethical hackers, cybersecurity engineers, incident responders, and cyber attorneys, Unit 221B delivers technology-driven operations that dismantle criminal networks and produce measurable disruption. Unit 221B is backed by J2 Ventures and Pipeline Capital. For more information, visit https://www.unit221b.com/.

CONTACT: media@unit221b.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/unit-221b-accelerates-product-strategy-with-appointment-of-cybersecurity-veteran-ben-april-as-chief-technology-officer-302839998.html

SOURCE Unit 221B