Espen Johansen

Espen leads Hg's Cyber team, which works as a single unit across the whole portfolio to strengthen security, resilience and risk management - empowering and enabling the security leaders in each portfolio company, and embedding good practice into how our companies build and operate.

Espen joined Hg in 2026 as Portfolio CISO. He was previously Chief Security Officer at Norvato, a Visma spin-off, where he built the group security programme across 22 operating entities and served on the management team. Before that he spent a decade building and leading Visma's group security programme spanning some 250 companies, 800 products and 32 markets with a particular depth in security through transactions: due diligence, post-acquisition integration and carve-outs at a pace of 30–40 deals a year. Earlier, following a military background, he spent a decade in private-sector intelligence and security operations against organised cybercrime and served as an advisory group member to Europol's European Cybercrime Centre.