Will Poole
CEO and Co-founder
Stand Intelligence
Will Poole is the co-founder of Strand Intelligence, a Manchester-based company applying AI to one of cybersecurity's hardest problems: the investigation that follows an attack.
Will's background is in frontline digital forensics and incident response (DFIR). As Principal Cyber Investigation Officer at the Information Commissioner's Office, he led cyber incident investigations and regulatory engagement following serious data breaches, working directly with organisations under scrutiny to assess the quality of their technical response, evidence, and reporting. He then moved to the front line himself, leading ransomware, business email compromise, and large-scale breach investigations across regulated and commercial environments. That experience exposed a structural problem: existing tooling automates evidence collection, but the analysis remains slow, manual, and dependent on a scarce pool of expert practitioners, at precisely the moment victims need answers fastest. Will founded Strand to close that gap. Strand's AI-native platform doesn't just gather evidence; it correlates data and reconstructs what happened across cloud and endpoint environments, trained and continuously refined by practising incident responders. The result is investigations completed up to five times faster, multiplying the capacity of DFIR teams rather than replacing them, and putting expert-grade investigation within reach of organisations when they need it most.