Three-time CMO, advisor, board director, and founder of Eudai. Featured in The Wall Street Journal; Elite 18 CMO and Fearless 50 honoree.
The Forrester Wave Leader
Elite 18 CMO
Fearless 50
Featured in WSJ
Gartner Cool Vendor
TIME America's Best Incubators & Accelerators
Board Director
Intellectual honesty.
We tell you what we see — not what\u2019s easy to hear. Clear eyes on the market, the work, and the odds.
Reach the highest potential.
Eudai means flourishing. We exist to turn an organization\u2019s potential into progress — for the team, the market, and the people it protects.
Built for disruption.
Perfect plans don\u2019t survive contact with this market. We help companies adapt continuously instead of waiting for certainty.
Security and innovation are one.
You can\u2019t innovate responsibly without securing it, and you can\u2019t secure what you don\u2019t innovate. We work at the convergence.
Responsible by default.
We help organizations adopt AI responsibly — with a lens for creating real value for every stakeholder.
Operators, not vendors.
Everyone on an engagement has shipped in the category. We sit beside you as peers, not as a supplier on a call.
Eudai helps teams turn disruption into capability — and capability into traction.
Marketing and Product Executive. Strategic Advisor. Board Director. Founder. Paula Fontana has led marketing in security and resilience for over a decade — launching new categories, navigating rapid change, and translating complex industries into stories practitioners actually trust.
See the work →
Paula Fontana
Founder · Eudai
The practice
Marketing run by people who shipped in the category.
Eudai (pronounced you-DAY) is about reaching your highest potential as an organization — and it lives at the convergence of security and innovation. Our job is to turn that convergence into capability, and capability into traction.
Paula’s leadership in marketing has been featured in
The Wall Street Journal
and recognized through industry awards including the Elite 18 CMO and Fearless 50 Marketing Leadership Awards. The companies we have worked with have earned recognition of their own along the way — Fusion named a
Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant
Leader in The Forrester Wave
, iluminr named a
and cited in the
Gartner Hype Cycle
three years running, and Product10x named to
TIME’s America’s Best Incubators & Accelerators 2026
, among others.
Whether launching new categories, navigating rapid change, or transforming complex industries, we thrive on turning potential into progress. Beyond her professional work, Paula finds adventure and fulfillment in the outdoors, the arts, and philanthropic causes in education.
A Chicago native, she brings a values-driven approach and relentless pursuit of innovation to every challenge — constantly pushing boundaries to help people, teams, and organizations reach their fullest potential.
The story
How Eudai started.
Paula left her full-time CMO post in 2025 because she saw how AI was reshaping the future of work — and she wanted to be an early adopter, not a late observer. So she did something deliberate: she dove into the work first. A different kind of launch — proving the model inside real engagements before aligning on the company Eudai was becoming.
The market answered the question for her. Over that time, more than
90% of our work
came from risk, security, and the investor community — and a bigger pattern came into focus: the convergence of security and innovation. One requires the other. You can’t innovate responsibly without securing it, and you can’t secure what you don’t innovate. Inside almost every organization, there are people who need help championing both.
That’s the work now. We’ve presented around the world — helping leaders traverse commercial disruption and adopt AI responsibly, with a lens for creating real value for every stakeholder. Paula also serves on the Private Directors Association’s
Research & Standards Committee
AI Governance Task Force
— helping shape how boards govern AI itself.
Presented at
+ many more
What we believe
The values behind the work.
Recognition
Awards, talks, and the work that earned them.
The network
Eudai is a studio of operators, not a generalist agency.
Paula leads every engagement, joined by a curated ecosystem of risk and security leaders, founders, designers, and writers who bring depth to the work. The right people, assembled around your brief — not a vendor stretching to cover a category they don't speak.
Former CISOs & GRC leads
Editorial directors
Brand & web designers
Demand & ops engineers
Analyst relations veterans
Field marketing producers
Building the next generation of CMOs for this market —
see the CMO Apprentice role →