# Cliff Crosland

> Cliff Crosland is a San Francisco software engineer, CEO, and co-founder of Scanner, a security data platform that indexes logs in Amazon S3 for fast search, detection, and AI-assisted investigation. His path runs from computer science at Stanford and early engineering roles at Amazon, Addepar, and Accompany to leading infrastructure for Cisco's Webex People Graph, then turning a painful lesson about million-dollar log bills into Scanner with co-founder Steven Wu. In March 2026, Scanner announced a $22 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from CRV and Mantis VC.

- **Role:** CEO and Co-founder at Scanner
- **Organizations:** Scanner, Cisco, Accompany, Seed Equity Ventures, Addepar, RedeemPlus, Amazon, Stanford University
- **Education:** Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Scanner and developed a security data platform purpose-built to index and search log data in Amazon S3., Raised a $22 million Series A for Scanner led by Sequoia Capital in March 2026, with participation from CRV and Mantis VC., Led backend infrastructure for the Webex People Graph as a principal engineer at Cisco.

## Career timeline

- **2006-2012** — Studied computer science at Stanford University and served as a computer science section leader; activities listed publicly include the Stanford Harmonics and KaeMe.
- **Early career** — Completed a software development internship at Amazon and worked as a software engineer at Addepar; later co-founded RedeemPlus and Seed Equity Ventures.
- **Before 2018** — Joined Accompany as an early engineer and became engineering lead for its data platform, working on large-scale crawling and data infrastructure.
- **2018** — Moved to Cisco after its acquisition of Accompany and later served as a principal engineer leading backend infrastructure for the Webex People Graph.
- **2021** — Co-founded Scanner with Steven Wu after their experience with the cost and search limitations of large-scale log data.
- **2023** — Appeared on Rustacean Station to explain Scanner's Rust-powered, serverless architecture for searching logs in S3.
- **2025** — Scanner released an MCP server connecting AI agents to security data and Crosland published and spoke extensively about security data lakes and human-agent workflows.
- **2026-03** — Scanner announced a $22 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from CRV and Mantis VC.
- **2026-03** — Scanner reported indexing 1.4 pebibytes and 689 billion events in 80 hours over a weekend.
- **2026-05** — Crosland published Scanner's case for a headless security operations model built around fast data access and agents tailored to each organization.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Scanner and developed a security data platform purpose-built to index and search log data in Amazon S3.
- Raised a $22 million Series A for Scanner led by Sequoia Capital in March 2026, with participation from CRV and Mantis VC.
- Led backend infrastructure for the Webex People Graph as a principal engineer at Cisco.
- Led the data platform engineering team at Accompany before Cisco acquired the company in 2018.
- Helped build Scanner's Rust-based architecture, which the company reported indexed 1.4 pebibytes and 689 billion events in 80 hours.
- Created black-hole.js, an open-source WebGL visualization of gravitational lensing with more than 300 GitHub stars.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Scanner announced that SVCI, an angel syndicate of working CISOs, invested in the company.
- **2026-05** — Crosland published Scanner's decision to pursue a headless security-operations direction in which agents can work directly over fast, complete data.
- **2026-03** — Scanner announced a $22 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with CRV and Mantis VC participating.
- **2026-03** — Scanner reported indexing 1.4 pebibytes of logs, representing 689 billion events, in 80 hours.
- **2026-01** — Scanner released detection rules as code, allowing teams to manage rules in their own GitHub repositories with review, testing, and CI/CD workflows.
- **2025-12** — Scanner announced its remote MCP server for connecting AI agents directly to security data.

## Links

- Website: https://cliffcrosland.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliftoncrosland/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/CliftonCrosland
- GitHub: https://github.com/cliffcrosland

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/cliff-crosland
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-18