Elizabeth Nammour

The engineer who refused to do it by hand

At Airbnb, the data kept multiplying. Hundreds of thousands of columns in the warehouse, spread across dozens of systems, each one possibly holding a name, a passport number, a home address. Somebody had to know which was which. For a while, that somebody was a team labeling them by hand. Elizabeth Nammour looked at that spreadsheet of toil and concluded what any good engineer concludes: this will never scale.

That conclusion is the whole company. Teleskope, the New York firm Nammour co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO, autonomously scans, catalogs, and classifies sensitive data wherever it lives - in motion and at rest - and then does the part most security tools never get to: it fixes things. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a sticker. Stop sending alerts. Start remediating.

Nammour came to security sideways. She joined Airbnb in 2017 through a reverse-pitch process where teams compete for new engineers, and she ended up on data security almost by accident before deciding she liked it there. What hooked her was the texture of the problem - part math, part plumbing, part office politics. As she puts it, the work is a mix of deeply technical challenges like operating at petabyte scale and maintaining accuracy, intertwined with human and organizational complexity. Most people find that combination exhausting. She found it interesting.

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The leap from internal tool to startup came from a blog post. Nammour wrote up her team's in-house approach - an article called "Automating Data Protection at Scale" - and published it on Airbnb's engineering blog. Engineers at other companies, including direct competitors, reached out to say they were building the exact same thing and getting nowhere. That convergence was the signal. If everyone is quietly reinventing the same wheel, the wheel should be a product. She raised a pre-seed in 2022 while still employed at Airbnb, then left to build it for real.

The technical opinion underneath Teleskope is contrarian in a useful way. While much of the industry reached for one large model to classify everything, Nammour's team chops the problem into smaller, fine-tuned models aimed at specific tasks. The counterintuitive result is that narrower is both more accurate and faster. "By segregating it into smaller problem sets, we are more accurate, but also faster," she says - a sentence that doubles as a quiet rebuke to the bigger-is-better reflex.

Her read on the market is that detection has become a commodity and remediation is the frontier. Plenty of platforms can light up a dashboard with everything that might be wrong. Far fewer can safely act on it. Teleskope leans into autonomous remediation - what Nammour and her investors call an "agentic" approach - where a security officer can upload a policy and let the platform both find the violations and resolve them, starting with human review and graduating to full automation where it has earned trust. When the company announced its Series A in late 2025, it billed itself as the industry's first agentic data security platform.

The money followed the metrics. In November 2025, Teleskope closed a $25 million Series A led by M13, with repeat checks from Primary Venture Partners and Lerer Hippeau, bringing total funding to $32.2 million. The traction underneath was the convincing part: roughly 23 customers, an 85% pilot-to-paid conversion rate, and 600% year-over-year growth. M13 was confident enough that nine more customers landed between the term sheet and the close. Some early customers came in organically, having read her blog, and a few reported that Teleskope paid for itself through storage savings alone - the rare security purchase that shows up as a credit.

There is a personal thread running through all of it. Nammour is a first-generation American with Lebanese roots. Her father leaned toward a liberal arts education for her; her own aptitude for math and affinity for computers pulled her toward engineering instead. She studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania with a minor in engineering entrepreneurship - a combination that reads, in hindsight, like a job description. Before Airbnb she had stints at Amazon as a software developer intern and at Booz Allen Hamilton in a strategic innovation role.

She does not describe herself as a security visionary. She describes herself as an operator at heart, a software engineer who loves to solve hard problems. That framing matters, because it explains why Teleskope feels less like a thesis and more like a fix. She lived the problem, hated the manual labor, and built the thing she wished had existed. The company she keeps reflects it: she co-founded Teleskope with CTO Julie Trias, a former Linux kernel developer and one of Airbnb's early site reliability engineers, and the two of them have been recognized as a rare all-women founding team in enterprise security. Nammour was nominated for the Women in Tech Global Awards in 2025.

What comes next, in her telling, is more autonomy, not less. She wants data security to follow the same arc that security operations centers have followed - from humans triaging alerts toward systems that quietly handle the routine and escalate the strange. The aspiration is a platform where protecting data is, as the company likes to say, simple, scalable, and second nature, so organizations can pour their data into AI systems without losing track of where it went. For someone who started by labeling columns one at a time, that is a very deliberate kind of revenge.

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