Eric ChiuTrust, Engineered.

The man who logged everything is now logging the machines.

In September 2025, a company called SolidCore.ai stepped out of stealth with $4 million and a deceptively simple promise: let enterprises build with generative AI without flying blind. Behind it was a name that cybersecurity insiders already knew. Eric Chiu had done this before, with a different new platform and the same instinct - find the place where everyone is rushing in, and build the thing that makes it safe to be there.

His bet this time is that every conversation an enterprise has with a large language model deserves a record. Not a log buried in a server somewhere, but an immutable system of record - proof of what was asked, what was answered, and whether any of it crossed a line. SolidCore watches GenAI applications in real time, flags policy violations and anomalous usage, and plugs into AWS and Azure without a proxy slowing anything down. It speaks the language of compliance officers, aligning with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001. The promise to a nervous Fortune 500: ship AI at the speed innovation demands, and sleep at night.

It is a familiar shape for anyone who watched his last act. Chiu did not start in security. He did not even start in software. He studied materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley - the science of why things hold together and why they break. Then he wandered into the late-1990s gold rush of investment banking and venture capital, working at firms like Brentwood, which would become Redpoint, and Pinnacle Ventures. He sat on the funding side of the table before he ever asked anyone for a check.

The pivot point was a VMware IPO

By the mid-2000s he had a taste for building. He joined mySimon, a comparison-shopping site later swallowed by CNET. He ran into security at MailFrontier, an email-gateway company, and at Cemaphore Systems. But the moment that defined him came in 2007, when VMware went public and the industry started seriously talking about running real workloads on virtual machines. Most people saw a hot stock. Chiu saw a gap.

That gap became HyTrust. The premise was almost boring in its confidence: if enterprises were going to consolidate their crown jewels onto virtualization, the concentration of risk would be enormous, and somebody had to build the control and visibility layer to manage it. Early competitors, Chiu liked to point out, were mostly "companies doing business as usual," leaning on the basic security controls baked into the platform. He bet against complacency. He won.

HyTrust grew into the kind of company whose customer list reads like a stress test of credibility - Bank of America, United Healthcare, Honeywell, and U.S. Central Command among them. When you are protecting the virtual infrastructure of a combatant command, the marketing tagline writes itself. The company was eventually acquired by Entrust, the kind of outcome founders spend a decade chasing.

An obsession with the threat already inside

Along the way, Chiu became one of the more quotable voices in the field, and his fixation was unfashionable. While the industry built taller walls, he kept pointing at the people already inside them. Insider threats, stolen credentials, administrators with too much access - this was his beat long before it was a headline.

His warnings now sound like prophecy. Attackers, he argued, were skipping the firewall entirely and going after people - phishing administrators, harvesting employee logins, then escalating from the inside. Stolen credentials, he said, had become "the new skeleton key." A decade later, that sentence describes a depressing share of every breach you read about.

Reuniting the band for the AI era

SolidCore is not a solo encore. Chiu founded it with Hemma Prafullchandra, his former CTO at HyTrust, who in the years between went on to serve as CTO for M365 Security and Compliance at Microsoft and as Microsoft Security's architect for AI security, privacy, and data residency. She is the rare technologist who has actually written company-wide GenAI security requirements for a company the size of Microsoft. Pairing her engineering depth with his pattern-recognition is the whole thesis: the same partnership that secured one new platform, aimed at the next one.

The funding came from Runtime Ventures, with Epic Ventures and a roster of cybersecurity angels alongside. The startup is plugged into the accelerator programs of NVIDIA, AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud at the same time - a small company keeping company with the biggest names in the stack it is trying to secure.

For founders who ask him how it is done, Chiu keeps the advice plain: hire top talent, pursue your passion courageously, build strong partnerships, and think strategically while executing well tactically. It is not a manifesto. It is the operating manual of someone who has shipped four companies and watched two of them get acquired in an industry that eats optimists for breakfast.

There is a tidy symmetry to where he has landed. The materials scientist who once studied why things break has spent twenty years making sure the most important things do not. First the data center. Then the cloud. Now the model. The platform keeps changing. The job - earn the trust, then prove you deserved it - stays exactly the same.