// ABOUT US — TWO DISCIPLINES · ONE MISSION

Built where AI ambition meets security reality.

Next Puzzle was founded by Noureen Njoroge and Tahseen Rabbani to close the gap between what artificial intelligence can do and what organizations can safely trust it to do.

We unite executive cyber leadership with frontier AI research and engineering—so strategy survives contact with real systems, real adversaries, and real accountability.

Noureen Njoroge

01 / CYBER LEADERSHIP AND ENGINEERING

Noureen Njoroge

CO-FOUNDER

Noureen helps boards, executives, and security teams turn emerging AI risk into practical decisions, durable operating models, and measurable resilience.

Noureen brings more than 15 years of enterprise security leadership across public and private sectors. Most recently, she served as Director of Global Cyber Threat Intelligence & Enterprise Threat Management at Nike, where she led globally distributed threat intelligence and threat hunting teams and advised senior leadership through high-severity incidents. Under her leadership, the global team established an enterprise-wide threat intelligence management framework that accelerated detection, strengthened cyber resilience, and enabled a more proactive, intelligence-led security posture.

Earlier, as Head of Cyber Threat Analytics & Incident Response in Cisco’s Managed Security Services practice, Noureen built a cyber threat analytics managed service and earned recognition as a Cisco Cybersecurity Champion. Her board and advisory work includes WiCyS, Cyber Leadership Institute, Flare, Nasdaq Center for Board Excellence, United Cybersecurity Alliance, and Africa Cyber Defense, where she guides organizations on cybersecurity governance, AI adoption, and emerging-technology strategy.

A two-time Cybersecurity Woman of the Year, Noureen is also President and Co-founder of North Carolina Women in Cybersecurity and Global Cybersecurity Mentoring. She earned an Executive MBA from Harvard and a B.S. in Information Technology from the University of Massachusetts, has completed advanced study at Harvard Business School, MIT, and UC Berkeley, and holds the CISM credential.

  • Two-time Cybersecurity Woman of the Year
  • Cisco Cybersecurity Champion
  • President and Co-founder, North Carolina Women in Cybersecurity
  • Executive MBA, Harvard · B.S. Information Technology, UMass · CISM
Tahseen Rabbani

02 / AI RESEARCH & ENGINEERING

Tahseen Rabbani

CO-FOUNDER

Tahseen translates advanced machine-learning research into efficient, private, and rigorously evaluated AI systems.

He is a computer scientist whose work spans agent evaluation, distributed learning, model efficiency, privacy, and generative watermarking. He is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago where his work includes application-security benchmarks and evaluation pipelines for frontier models.

Among his wide breadth of industry roles, Tahseen served as an AI Strategy Consultant at Scale AI, Forward Deployed Engineer at Appen, and Software Developer at Epic Systems. He was a key contributor to the development of industry agentic benchmarks such as PRBench, ResearchRubrics, the Remote Labor Index, and RADAR.

Tahseen earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Virginia. His peer-reviewed work has appeared at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, and TMLR, connecting rigorous research with real-world systems and evaluation.

  • Stanford Rising Star in Data Science
  • RSAC National Security Scholar
  • PhD, Computer Science—University of Maryland · B.A., Mathematics—University of Virginia
  • Builder of benchmarks for agents, reasoning, and model integrity

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Bring us your hard problem.

Whether you are shaping an AI strategy, securing an agentic system, or preparing your leaders and teams, we will meet you at the point where the stakes become real.

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