Secure Ventures with Kyle McNulty

Gianni Cuozzo is founder and CEO at Exein. Exein is an OT and IoT security company providing enhanced endpoint monitoring, and the company has really hit its stride in the last couple of years having raised 100M euros in late 2025. As Gianni talks about in the episode, it’s been a long journey. He started his career in the intelligence community like some of the other OT security greats like the f...

Project Discovery is an autonomous software testing platform with a focus on remediation rather than purely vulnerability identification. Before starting Project Discovery in 2021, Rishi worked as a security engineer for almost a decade, if you include the two years while he was still in high school where he was bringing in $50,000 a year from bug bounties. In the episode we discuss how Project Di...

If you have any sort of connection to former congressman Barney Frank, please reach out to Graham! Graham Neray is CEO of Oso. Oso provides authorization, governance, and security for AI agents to help customers confidently control their agent footprint. The company was founded in 2019 for authorization-as-a-service more generally, and they have since found traction using their technology to secur...

Raj Rajamani is co-founder and CEO of JetStream. JetStream sells an AI agent governance and identity platform designed to help organizations identify and control their sprawling AI footprint. In a crowded space, JetStream has emerged as a leader with a world-class team and $34 million seed round. Before JetStream, Raj has a storied career as a product leader at several of the most important EDR co...

In this episode I talk to Jack Austin, founder of surf forecasting company Duune. If you are only interested in hearing from cyber founders, this episode is not for you. However, Jack works in cybersecurity full-time at F5 Networks, and this is very much a passion project in an industry he cares deeply about. We discuss his decision to start a company outside of cybersecurity, his tactics for taki...

With me in this episode is Henry Comfort, Co-founder and CEO of Geordie. Geordie is an AI observability and risk management platform designed to help organizations confidently and securely deploy AI models and agents. They raised a $6.5 million seed round last fall from General Catalyst and 1011 and were just announced as a finalist in the RSA Innovation Sandbox competition. Before Geordie, Henry...

With me in this episode is Ed Bellis, co-founder and CEO of Empirical Security. Empirical uses a scoring system informed by customer data to create tailored risk prioritization models. Ed started Empirical in 2024 after leaving Cisco, three years after they acquired his previous company Kenna. Kenna was a vulnerability management and prioritization tool that aggregated data from an organization&#3...

Andrew Rubin is co-founder and CEO of Illumio. Illumio is a breach containment and network segmentation company that has become a mainstay in the cybersecurity market over the last decade. Illumio was last valued at almost $3 billion dollars and is now on the verge of going public as we discuss in the episode. Before Illumio, Andrew grew his career in sales at VoiceNet in the late 90s and early 20...

With me in this episode is John Ackerly, co-founder and CEO of Virtru. John started Virtru with his brother Will over a decade ago to make data security more pervasive across mediums such as emails and files. Virtru has raised over $150 million to this point from investors such as ICONIQ and Bessemer and built a very healthy business on one of the core pillars of cybersecurity. John has an atypica...

Kris Kamber is CEO of SPLX AI. SPLX performs security testing and red teaming for AI agents, helping organizations detect vulnerabilities in their constantly expanding agent deployments. Before SPLX, Kris worked a handful of sales jobs, starting in telecom before hustling his way into Zscaler. I enjoyed asking him about the specific lessons from working in sales such as setting metrics and compens...

Mariano founded Onapsis back in 2009 to address the challenges securing a growing new class of technology: ERP systems. After working at CYBSEC for 5 years doing offensive security research, he discovered just how vulnerable SAP applications could be. Onapsis is sneakily a juggernaut, having raised a $55 million Series D in 2020. And while they started focused on SAP, they have since expanded into...

Vrajesh is co-founder and CEO at Operant AI. Operant AI is a holistic AI security platform, helping organizations discover, detect, and defend AI deployments. Operant raised a $10 million dollar Series A last fall from Felicis and SineWave, and the company continues to expand its offerings within AI security. Before Operant, Vrajesh worked at Apple, Qualcomm, Arm, and Scaled Inference, rounding ou...

With me in this episode is Rishi Bhargava, co-founder of Descope. Rishi has a standout background having founded Demisto in 2015 and then selling to Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for over $500 million dollars. Before Demisto, he was a VP at McAfee and Intel. Rishi is extremely knowledgable about go-to-market in the cyber domain, and we dove into his lessons learned over his career and how he has appl...

Brian Pontarelli is co-founder and CTO of FusionAuth. FusionAuth helps companies easily roll authentication workflows for their public facing applications. For example, FusionAuth is an alternative to writing custom code for user creation and multi-factor authentication login for a new web application. FusionAuth is entirely bootstrapped, and the company has successfully become a legitimate enterp...

Kamal is co-founder and CTO at Andromeda, which is building an identity management solution to help companies better understand their identity footprint and manage excessive permissions across disparate platforms. Kamal uses the term "digital incarnation" which resonated with me given the number of accounts a single human may have across different platforms. Kamal worked as an engineer a...

This episode was recorded live at the Dreamit Cyber Founders Summit during RSA. Huge thanks to the Dreamit team for including me during their inaugural event! David Cass is the CISO at GSR, which is a cryptocurrency market maker. For the finance uninitiated, that basically means they buy and sell cryptocurrencies in large volumes to then buy and sell to other parties. As a result, David's role...

Rehan is CEO and founder of Securiti AI, which is providing a data command center to help organizations secure and enable their data for AI use cases. Rehan as an incredible track record which we discuss in more detail on the episode. He sold his first company for $180 million, and his second company for $280 million. Securiti AI has already raised $180 million to date from top tier investors, and...

Raj is CEO and co-founder of Blueflag, which helps ensure developers only have the access permissions needed for their roles, reducing risk of excess exposure. Raj started his career as an engineer and then in marketing at Adobe and VMware before taking on a COO role at Cloudknox, which they later sold to Microsoft. Raj took his lessons from working with identity at Cloudknox and applied them to d...

Luke is Chief Product Officer and co-founder at Semgrep. Semgrep performs static application security testing, a form of code analysis, and has grown to become one of the mainstay application security tools on the market over the last eight years. Luke started Semgrep after three years at Palantir as a software engineer and product manager, and this episode really helped drive home the supportive...

Recorded live at Blu Ventures’ Cyber Venture Forum! I got the chance to speak with Rick Howard, previously Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks from 2013 to 2019. Rick has a wealth of cybersecurity industry experience, and he wrote a book called Cybersecurity First Principles and maintains the cybersecurity book hall of fame, called the Cybersecurity Canon. In this episode we discussed his...

This episode is a recording of a live interview held on stage at Blu Ventures' Cyber Venture Forum in February. A huge shoutout and thank you to the Blu Ventures team for putting together an awesome event. Bricklayer is building an AI-based agent to assist with security operations workflows. Before Bricklayer, Adam founded ThreatConnect which he led for over a decade. In the conversation we di...

Amir is co-founder and CEO at Vorlon Security, which provides visibility and monitoring for SaaS app connections within an enterprise. For example, Vorlon can detect what other applications are connected to your Salesforce instance along with what data is flowing between each relationship. This helps security teams detect data exfiltration, data leakage, improper configuration, and more. Before Vo...

Josh Kamdjou is CEO and Founder of Sublime Security. Josh started Sublime after realizing just how easy it was for him to break into companies with phishing emails. He wanted to build a solution that better addressed the tailored environment of each organization such as historical data. Now the company has raised over $80 million from leading VCs such as IVP, Index Ventures, and Decibel. Before Su...

Jon is co-founder and CEO of Halcyon, which is building an endpoint solution fully focused on anti-ransomware. Halcyon recently raised at a $1B valuation in 2024. Jon started his career in cybersecurity consulting for a decade before joining Cylance in 2014 as Chief Research Officer. After his stint at Cylance, in 2017 Jon founded Boldend, which was building offensive cyber capabilities to be used...

Tushar was the CEO of Attivo Networks for a decade before selling to SentinelOne for $600 million dollars in 2022. Attivo Networks built deception technology which would trick attackers into attacking fake infrastructure. A common form of deception is a honeypot, which is an intentionally vulnerable server so defenders can gather information about attackers such as their IP address or attack techn...