Two companies built. One sold to SAP. Another backed by Kleiner Perkins. Now teaching AI to guard the doors.
Jasvir Gill - AlertEnterprise
In 2007, Jasvir Gill did something most executives never do after a successful exit: he turned down the comfort of his senior vice president role at SAP and started over. He had just sold Virsa Systems to SAP the year before - a company he built from a consulting shop into the de facto standard for enterprise governance, risk, and compliance software. The acquisition price was approximately $400 million.
Most people use that as a retirement story. Gill used it as a research trip.
What he noticed running SAP's GRC business unit was a gap nobody was talking about: corporate IT systems knew exactly who could access what digitally, but the physical world - badge readers, access control panels, factory floors, power plant gates - operated on completely different logic. An employee could be terminated in HR, have their laptop decommissioned, and still badge into the server room the next morning. Identity governance stopped at the firewall.
That gap became AlertEnterprise. Headquartered in Fremont, California, the platform converges physical security, cybersecurity, and identity governance into a single AI-powered system. It handles automated access control, compliance reporting, insider threat detection, and policy enforcement - for the Fortune 500, utilities, airports, critical infrastructure operators, and government agencies that can't afford to find out what happens when the doors don't know the rules.
Gill brought in co-founder Kaval Kaur - who had been CFO at Virsa Systems - to run AlertEnterprise's finances and operations. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, which had also backed Virsa, came in for AlertEnterprise's Series B. The pattern was not coincidental.
"Cybersecurity threats now extend well beyond just IT-related attacks. Intruders are extending their attack vectors to combine this with threats to physical security and SCADA Industrial Control Systems."- Jasvir Gill, AlertEnterprise
Gill's father came to India from Pakistan during partition - not by choice. A cholera epidemic and the chaos of 1947 brought the family across the border. His grandfather, dying, extracted one promise: give the boy an education. That promise shaped everything downstream. The household Gill grew up in had no television. Only books.
He attended Khalsa College in Punjab in the early 1980s, studying engineering. Then 1984 arrived. During the Punjab riots, his brother was detained by police for two days - no contact, no word, no explanation. The family waited without knowing if he was alive. Jasvir decided, after that, that he was leaving.
He arrived in the United States in 1985 and went to work on defense software. The company he worked for was acquired by IBM. IBM laid him off. In Silicon Valley in the 1990s, that kind of disruption often arrives without warning and leaves with a check and a month's notice.
He had options. He chose to start something. Virsa Systems began as a compliance consulting firm - not glamorous, but a good vantage point for understanding what large American corporations were getting wrong in their internal controls. What he found was startling: systemic vulnerabilities in how enterprises managed access, including one case involving a seven-digit fraud enabled by fictitious employees who had been provisioned full system access.
Gill pivoted Virsa from consulting into software. The timing was right. Sarbanes-Oxley had just passed. Every Fortune 500 company suddenly needed to prove their internal controls were real. Virsa had the answer.
His grandfather's dying wish was that his father receive an education. That household had no television. Only books. Gill carries that inheritance into every company he builds.
In 1984, his brother was detained by Punjab police for two days with no family contact. Gill decided to leave India. He landed in America in 1985 with an engineering degree from Khalsa College and ended up building two security empires.
When IBM acquired his early employer and laid him off, Gill treated it not as a setback but as the moment that forced the entrepreneurial leap. "Every person can make a difference," he says - and he means it as operational philosophy, not slogan.
He co-created a Punjabi comedy show called Khatiyan Meethiyaan for California radio. The man who closes multi-million dollar security contracts for utilities also writes bits about village life for the Punjabi diaspora.
At Virsa, Gill did not just build a product - he invented a market. Governance, Risk, and Compliance as an enterprise software segment barely existed before Virsa named it. His Continuous Compliance Suite gave large corporations, for the first time, a systematic way to enforce internal controls and audit access across complex SAP environments. Before Sarbanes-Oxley made GRC non-negotiable, Gill was already there. Virsa raised $15 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2004. Two years later, SAP bought the company. The GRC unit Gill then ran at SAP signed more than 1,000 enterprise customers.
AlertEnterprise extended the same thesis into territory SAP never touched. Digital identity governance - who is allowed where in a system, under what conditions - was a solved (or at least investable) problem. Physical identity governance was not. Gill built a platform that sits between HR systems, IT provisioning, badge readers, video surveillance, and compliance reporting engines, knitting them into a single picture. If you are a utility operator complying with NERC CIP, an airport managing contractor access, or a pharma company managing cleanroom entry, AlertEnterprise is the layer that enforces policy across all of it.
In 2023, Gill made a bet that the rest of the industry was still debating: he launched Guardian, the first AI chatbot built specifically for physical security operations. Powered initially by OpenAI's ChatGPT and later extended with IBM's watsonx.ai (using the Granite 13B model) and Microsoft Security Copilot, Guardian lets security operators interrogate access logs, investigate anomalies, and manage incidents through natural language. The building's AI, in effect, can answer questions.
By 2025, AlertEnterprise had grown to roughly 300 employees and $66 million in annual revenue, with a platform spanning access control, visitor management, insider threat detection, emergency mustering, space utilization, and contractor pre-onboarding - all on a cloud SaaS architecture built for hybrid environments and multi-tenant deployments.
"Integrity and humility are the key ingredients to lasting success."- Jasvir Gill
Founded Virsa Systems and invented the enterprise GRC software category
Won RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox - cybersecurity's top startup prize
Facilitated Virsa's ~$400M acquisition by SAP; built GRC unit to 1,000+ customers
Founded AlertEnterprise, backed twice by Kleiner Perkins, $46M total raised
Launched Guardian - first ChatGPT-powered AI chatbot for physical security (2023)
IFSEC Global Top 5 Security Influencer in design, development & integration (2019)
Founding member, SIA Utilities Advisory Board Steering Committee
Trustee, American India Foundation; runs Trakki program for children's education in Punjab
Gill's central argument is that the security industry has been solving half the problem for thirty years. Cybersecurity has become sophisticated, well-funded, and deeply tooled. Physical security - the badge reader on the door, the camera in the corridor, the access log that says who entered the server room at 2am - has mostly stayed analog, siloed, and slow.
The convergence Gill is building means that when a contractor's HR record is updated to show their engagement has ended, the physical door to the facility and the VPN credential and the badge access all update simultaneously. When someone who has been flagged in the insider threat module tries to badge into a restricted area, the system can escalate the event in real time. When a utility operator needs to demonstrate NERC CIP compliance, the audit trail spanning both digital and physical access is already compiled.
The Guardian AI chatbot is the interface layer on top of all this - a natural language query engine that lets security operations staff ask questions like "who has accessed building 3 after hours in the last 30 days" without writing a SQL query or navigating a legacy system menu. It answers in plain language and surfaces the anomalies it has learned to recognize.
Gill has called the industry's inflection point explicitly: "the threat landscape is cyberphysical, converged, complex, and demands integrated governance." He specifically addresses critical infrastructure - the identity gap between who is digitally provisioned and who can walk through a physical gate is exactly where sophisticated attackers now aim.
"This is an exciting time for the industry and Alert Enterprise, as cyber-physical convergence, physical identity and access governance, and digital transformation expand the boundaries of security to become a true business enabler."- Jasvir Gill, on IFSEC recognition
"[Gill is] driving the long-overdue Digital Transformation of the Physical Security industry - identifying market trends and customer needs and bringing them together in a unique way."- SecurityInformed.com profile
Colleagues who have worked with Gill over decades note consistency: he hires people he describes as A-plus talent, builds cultures where "every person can make a difference," and stays accessible in ways that surprise people who have met him only through his press coverage. Despite the two exits and the Kleiner Perkins backing, he has described his approach as built on a foundation of integrity and humility - and the people around him tend to confirm it.
He has two sons. They play basketball together as "Team Gill." He bought land in the Chandigarh IT Park - maintaining a tangible stake in the Punjab he left in 1985, not just a nostalgic connection. His Trakki initiative sponsors education for underprivileged children in India. He serves as a trustee of the American India Foundation. These are not PR activities. They are the carrying-forward of the grandfather's dying wish, operationalized across three generations.
The Punjabi comedy radio show is the detail that refuses to fit the standard Silicon Valley founder template. Gill co-created "Khatiyan Meethiyaan" - roughly translating to "bitter-sweet stories" - for California radio. It is the kind of thing that makes more sense when you understand where he is from: a culture with a specific and irreverent sense of humor, a deep communal tradition of storytelling, and an immigrant population in California large enough to sustain a radio show about village life and its American echoes.
Backed by Kleiner Perkins twice - first for Virsa Systems in 2004, then for AlertEnterprise in 2011. Getting Kleiner once is rare. Twice is a pattern.Funding History
Won the RSA Innovation Sandbox with Virsa. Returned to RSA 20 years later as an honored Founder's Circle member representing AlertEnterprise. Full circle.RSA Conference, 2025
His employer was acquired by IBM. He was laid off. He counted it as the best thing that happened to him - it forced the decision to start Virsa instead of finding a new desk.Origin Story
He bought land in the Chandigarh IT Park. Physical presence in Punjab even while running a Fremont-based security AI company with 300 employees.Punjab Connection
The Virsa discovery that shaped AlertEnterprise: a seven-digit corporate fraud enabled entirely by fictitious employees who had full system access. The door didn't know the rules.The Founding Insight
His grandfather, on his deathbed, asked only that his son receive an education. That wish traveled from Pakistan to Punjab to Silicon Valley and shaped two companies worth hundreds of millions.Family Legacy