Tomas Okmanas (born November 5, 1987) is a Lithuanian tech entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of several global startups. He is best known as the co-founder and co-CEO of Nord Security, a global cybersecurity company that provides a popular

VPN service A virtual private network (VPN) service is a proxy server marketed to help users bypass Internet censorship such as geo-blocking and users who want to protect their communications against data profiling or MitM attacks on hostile networks. ...

NordVPN NordVPN is a Lithuanian VPN service founded in 2012. NordVPN is developed by Nord Security (formerly Nordsec Ltd), a cybersecurity software company that was initially supported by Tesonet, a Lithuanian startup accelerator and business incubat ...

. Okmanas focuses on bootstrapping and leveraging technology to grow businesses in multiple different industries. As the co-founder of Tesonet house of brands, he built a diverse investment portfolio. It currently includes a web intelligence collection platform Oxylabs, a hosting provider Hostinger, and a cybersecurity company Surfshark. All three were listed among the fastest-growing European companies by The Financial Times. Hostinger was also named the fastest-growing brand in its market. Tesonet is a shareholder at

Šiaulių Bankas Šiaulių bankas is a major commercial bank in Lithuania providing retail and commercial banking services. It has been designated in 2019 as a Significant Institution under the criteria of European Banking Supervision, and as a consequence is dir ...

, one of the biggest banks in Lithuania, where Okmanas currently holds a seat on the supervisory board. In 2022, Okmanas entered the sports industry as a part-owner of

EuroLeague The EuroLeague is a European men's professional basketball club competition. The league is widely recognised as the top-tier and the most prestigious men's basketball league in Europe. The league consists of 20 teams, of which 16 are given lon ...

team

BC Žalgiris Basketball Club Žalgiris () commonly known as BC Žalgiris, is a professional basketball club based in Kaunas, Lithuania. They compete domestically in the Lietuvos krepšinio lyga, Lithuanian Basketball League (''Lietuvos krepšinio lyga'') and ...

. In 2024, he expanded his ownership by acquiring the BC London Lions. Through Tesonet, Okmanas is also a venture-capital investor in various industries, including gaming, adtech, AI, retail, and deep tech. He is also a Limited Partner in several venture capital funds, including Creandum, Plural, and Moonfire. In 2024, the combined workforce across all his ventures was 3,200 people.

Early life

Okmanas was born and raised in

Vilnius Vilnius ( , ) is the capital of and List of cities in Lithuania#Cities, largest city in Lithuania and the List of cities in the Baltic states by population, most-populous city in the Baltic states. The city's estimated January 2025 population w ...

. He earned a bachelor's degree in history at

Vilnius University Vilnius University ( Lithuanian: ''Vilniaus universitetas'') is a public research university, which is the first and largest university in Lithuania, as well as one of the oldest and most prominent higher education institutions in Central and Ea ...

and later earned a master's degree in e-business management at Mykolas Romeris University.

Career

Okmanas founded Tesonet together with Eimantas Sabaliauskas in 2008. After trying 34 various projects and ideas, from computer games to

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web ho ...

solutions, they finally focused on network security, business hosting, and

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

solutions. Both individually and through the Tesonet accelerator, Okmanas invested in more than 50 different projects and ventures. He is actively involved in mentoring new ventures in the Lithuanian startup ecosystem and has taken part in launching a new association aimed at the growth of active Lithuanian startups. In 2012, Okmanas co-founded the VPN service company

. He contributed to the development of the solution, significantly reducing the time required for TCP packets to travel between the client, the VPN server, and their ultimate destination. Okmanas is listed as one of the inventors of this method in the US patent office database. In 2017, Okmanas co-founded Nord Security, an umbrella company for several cybersecurity solutions both for clients and businesses, like

, NordLayer, and

NordPass NordPass is a proprietary password manager launched in 2019. It allows its users to organize their passwords and secure notes by keeping them in a single encrypted vault. NordPass, which operates on a freemium business model, was developed by the ...

. However, a near-future vision for Nord Security, according to Okmanas, is to have one app that users could forget about after its activation: it would cover all the important areas of consumer security in the background. Since 2020, Okmanas has been a member of the

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

Technology Council. He is also a member of the board of trustees at the

Institute of International Relations and Political Science, together with the eighth President of the Republic of Lithuania

Dalia Grybauskaitė Dalia Grybauskaitė (; born 1 March 1956) is a Lithuanian politician who served as the eighth president of Lithuania from 2009 to 2019. She is the first and so far only woman to hold the position and in 2014 she became the first President of Li ...

and other prominent Lithuanian figures. In 2023, together with Eimantas Sabaliauskas, Okmanas helped raise a million euros to Ukraine in an hour, and then doubled the donation. For their philanthropy, Okmanas and Sabaliauskas were named National Patrons of Lithuania. As of 2024, Okmanas’ net worth is estimated to be €1.2 billion.

Advocacy

Okmanas is a member of the board of directors of the Internet infrastructure coalition (i2Coalition). This initiative ensures that those who build the infrastructure of the internet have a voice in public policy. In 2019, i2Coalition and six leading

VPN Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...

service providers launched an initiative called VPN Trust Initiative (VTI). A year later, VTI released a set of VTI Principles to offer a comprehensive set of best practices for VPN providers. Speaking on behalf of NordVPN, a member of VTI, Okmanas stated that the release of VTI Principles and Standards sets the bar for the whole industry.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Okman, Tom 1987 births Living people Chief executives of computer security organizations Technology company founders Internet company founders Businesspeople in software 21st-century Lithuanian businesspeople Lithuanian business executives Businesspeople from Vilnius Vilnius University alumni Mykolas Romeris University alumni