A career that started in Congress, not in cybersecurity.
Chris Bowen's career began in politics, working for the U.S. House of Representatives before being drawn into healthcare policy by the Donor Network of Arizona, which asked him to help rewrite the state's organ donation legislation — work that put him face to face with the highest-stakes moments healthcare deals in, often within the same 24-hour window.
That experience led him to the Arizona House Majority leadership, where he served as a key aide to the Speaker on healthcare reform and internet privacy legislation, while pursuing his MBA. The two threads — healthcare and privacy — never separated again.
Chris founded DirectClarity just as the Affordable Care Act’s push toward Accountable Care Organizations was reshaping how physicians needed to coordinate care — connecting and securing care delivery for a network of 43,000+ physicians. That work made clear that no company existed solely dedicated to protecting patient data in the cloud — so he founded ClearDATA, serving as Founder, CISO, and Chief Privacy Officer as the company scaled to $68M in ARR with backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Excel Venture Partners, The Heritage Group, Humana, Merck, and HCSC. ClearDATA was acquired.
He carried that experience directly into advisory work. Today, he runs Bowen & Company, a fractional executive leadership and healthcare GRC advisory practice, leads Named CISO, a retained CISO offering for organizations that need embedded security leadership, and is building Control Layer AI and PRIVV — applying the same discipline to AI governance and capital project oversight that he's spent his career applying to healthcare data.
That combination — security and privacy depth, paired with the P&L ownership and fundraising experience of a multi-time founder — is why Chris is equally positioned to lead as a Chief Executive Officer or as a Chief Information Security Officer in regulated industries.