Ivan Novikov is the founder and CEO of Wallarm, an AI-powered API security platform that has raised over $70 million in funding including a $55M Series C in 2025. With 24+ years in cybersecurity, he is recognized as the inventor of memcached injection attacks and a pioneer of SSRF research, having earned bug bounty awards from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and Yandex. A Y Combinator S16 alumnus with a physics background from Moscow State University, Novikov transformed hands-on offensive security expertise into a company protecting APIs for enterprises worldwide.
Wallarm is a San Francisco-based API and application security company protecting more than half of public-facing APIs at large enterprises with a unified platform for API discovery, attack prevention, and AI-era threat protection.
Stepan Ilyin is the Co-Founder and COO of Wallarm, a San Francisco-based API and application security company that raised $55M in Series C funding in 2025. A former whitehat hacker and Bauman Moscow State Technical University graduate, he co-founded Wallarm in 2013 alongside Ivan Novikov and others, with the company graduating from Y Combinator's S16 batch. Wallarm now protects Fortune 500 enterprises with AI-powered API security, real-time threat detection, and CI/CD-integrated vulnerability management. Ilyin has authored over 500 publications on DevSecOps, API security, and AI threat prevention, and is a recognized conference speaker at Black Hat, RSA, and similar venues.
Chenxi Wang is the founder and managing general partner of Rain Capital, a cybersecurity-focused venture fund based in the Bay Area. A computer scientist turned operator turned investor, she built a code-obfuscation technique (chenxification) used by the U.S. Department of Defense, helped found Carnegie Mellon's cybersecurity lab, ran research at Forrester, strategy at Intel Security and Twistlock, and now writes seed and Series A checks into AI-native security companies.
Chris Hughes is a U.S. Air Force veteran, co-founder and president of Aquia Inc., VP of Security Strategy at Zenity, and the founder of Resilient Cyber - a cybersecurity newsletter and podcast with 31,000+ subscribers. A three-time Wiley/Springer author, inaugural CISA Cyber Innovation Fellow, and adjunct professor at two universities, Hughes has become one of the most influential voices on software supply chain security, vulnerability management, and agentic AI security.