security
(35)
Michael Blicher Sørensen and the Business of Giving AI Permission
From Danish defence to Meta to Velatir, Michael Blicher Sørensen has built a career around oversight. His next challenge is helping companies use AI while keeping people responsible for what happens.
The Spanish Company That Answers the Door for 85 Countries
Every apartment buzzer has a story. For millions of doors from Valencia to Sydney, the story starts at a Spanish radio-repair workshop that opened in 1949.
Modern
Modern is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native IT function - a single platform where always-on agents automate help desk, access, hardware, on/off-boarding, security and procurement inside the tools teams already use, such as Slack, Teams, email and voice. Founded in 2026 by Seb Poole and Aleks Tomovski and backed by Y Combinator (P26), it positions itself as a ServiceNow alternative that resolves requests end-to-end rather than routing tickets, claiming 80%+ automation of inbound IT requests.
Munily App
Munily is a Panama-based proptech company building an access-control and community-management platform for gated communities across Latin America. It replaces broken intercoms and paper visitor logs with an app-and-tablet system that connects security guards, residents, and property administrators - guards photograph a visitor's ID and pick the apartment, and residents approve or deny entry from their phones. A Y Combinator W22 company, Munily has expanded into billing automation, live amenity reservations, and AI-assisted access (license-plate and facial recognition).
Jon Hawkins
Jon 'Irish' Hawkins is an Australian Defence Force veteran of 25 years, SAS-trained officer, and the founder of Omni Executive - one of Australia's fastest-growing sovereign defence companies. Starting from an idea at his kitchen table in 2012, he built Omni into a 400+ person operation spanning aerospace, consulting, security, maritime and vetting, with around $100 million in annual turnover. A fierce advocate for truly Australian-owned defence capability, he stepped back from the CEO role in February 2026 to serve as Chair of Omni's Board.
Zania
Zania builds autonomous AI agents for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Founded in 2023 by former CISO Shruti Gupta, the Palo Alto company deploys domain-specific 'AI teammates' that run third-party risk reviews, controls testing, evidence collection, security questionnaires, and continuous compliance across frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA - work it claims runs up to 30x faster at 90% lower cost with 94%+ accuracy. It raised an $18M Series A led by NEA in 2025.
Network Solutions
Network Solutions is the original commercial domain registrar - the company that ran the .com, .net and .org registries under U.S. government contract in the 1990s and registered the internet's first wave of domain names. Today it operates as a Newfold Digital brand, selling domains, web hosting, websites, professional email, SSL/security and online marketing to small businesses, entrepreneurs and IT professionals. In 2025 it absorbed the Web.com and Register.com brands to become Newfold's flagship all-in-one online-presence platform.
Infisical
Infisical is an open-source security platform that helps engineering teams manage secrets, certificates, and machine identities in one place. Born out of Y Combinator's W23 batch, it replaces scattered .env files and hardcoded API keys with a unified, MIT-licensed stack covering secrets management, dynamic secrets, rotation, secret scanning, PKI, KMS, SSH, and privileged access. Used by companies like Hugging Face, LG, and Lucid, it secures billions of secrets and is backed by Elad Gil, Google's Gradient Ventures, and Y Combinator.
KoreLock
KoreLock is a Denver-based IoT smart lock technology company that gives lock manufacturers and access control providers a turnkey, patented platform - embedded firmware, custom PCBAs, mobile and web apps, and cloud APIs - to turn ordinary offline locks into Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connected devices. Rather than competing with lock makers or software companies, KoreLock positions itself as the interoperability bridge between hardware and access control software, with technology already embedded in tens of thousands of devices across 65+ countries.
Muneeza Zaidi
Muneeza Zaidi is VP of Product Strategy and Growth at Microsoft, where she leads cloud ecosystem strategy and AI for Security initiatives. With over 12 years spanning Microsoft, AWS, and Splunk, she has shaped product direction at some of tech's most influential companies. A guest lecturer at Stanford's CS229 machine learning course and a vocal advocate for women in technology, she brings a rare blend of financial modeling rigor and ecosystem-scale thinking to her work.
Oomnitza
Oomnitza is a San Francisco-based Enterprise Technology Management platform that gives IT teams a single, accurate picture of every asset in their organization — hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud — with 98%+ data accuracy and 1,500+ pre-built integrations. Founded in 2012, the company helps enterprises reduce costs, enforce compliance, and automate IT workflows across the full asset lifecycle, from procurement to offboarding.
Christina Cacioppo
Christina Cacioppo is the co-founder and CEO of Vanta, the agentic trust management platform that has become the default infrastructure for security compliance among modern tech companies. After stints at Union Square Ventures and Dropbox Paper, she built Vanta from a spreadsheet prototype into a $4.15 billion company serving 12,000+ organizations across 58 countries, raising $504 million in total funding. She is one of America's self-made female billionaires, known for applying rigorous first-principles thinking to the usually-dull world of corporate security.
Raghuveer Kancherla
Raghuveer Kancherla is the Co-Founder of Sprinto, a fast-growing compliance automation platform that helps SaaS companies earn security certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA faster and with far less manual effort. A mechanical engineer by training from IIT Madras turned software entrepreneur, Raghuveer previously co-founded and served as CTO of RecruiterBox - a bootstrapped applicant tracking system that grew to 2,500+ customers before being acquired. At Sprinto, he and co-founder Girish Redekar have built a platform trusted by 3,000+ companies across 75 countries, raised $31.5M in funding including a $20M Series B led by Accel in 2024, and grown the team from 6 to 300+ employees. An emerging thought leader on AI governance, Raghuveer is known for his conviction that 'a growing market trumps having a better product' and his systems-first approach to both engineering and team management.
Sprinto
Sprinto is a compliance and trust automation platform that helps cloud-first companies achieve and maintain certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR without drowning in spreadsheets. It connects to 300+ business systems, continuously monitors controls, and orchestrates audits end-to-end - turning what used to be a six-month consulting project into a continuous, mostly-automated background process.
Teleport
Teleport is the infrastructure identity company. Its open-source Access Platform replaces shared secrets, VPNs, and long-lived credentials with short-lived cryptographic identities for humans, machines, and AI agents accessing servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, applications, and Windows desktops.
Vanta
Vanta is the trust management platform that automates security and compliance for more than 16,000 companies - turning SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR and dozens of other frameworks from a months-long PDF marathon into something a startup can pass before lunch.
Mike Dauber
Mike Dauber is a General Partner at Amplify Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture firm with over $900M under management focused exclusively on deeply technical founders. A former hardware engineer turned enterprise sales executive at Altera and Xilinx, he brings rare operator credibility to early-stage investing across developer tools, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI. He backed companies including Chainguard, Temporal, and Gremlin, and earlier investments include Splunk's rise to NASDAQ. His investing philosophy centers on 'practitioner founders' - operators who have lived the problems they solve.
Steve Krausz
Steve Krausz is a General Partner (now Senior Advisor) at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), one of Silicon Valley's longest-running early-stage venture capital firms. With over 35 years of investing experience, he has led or co-led board-level involvement in landmark exits including Check Point Software, Box, Guidewire Software, Imperva, and Trusteer (acquired by IBM). A Stanford-trained electrical engineer and Arjay Miller Scholar MBA, Krausz joined USVP in 1985 and has built deep domain expertise in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and data analytics. He currently serves on the boards of Cato Networks, Human Interest, Quantifind, Badge, Informed.iq, and Zefr, and is a strategic advisor to the B612 Foundation, which tracks near-Earth asteroids.
Peter Doyle
Peter Doyle is Co-Founder and CEO of Treeline, a San Francisco-based startup reimagining corporate IT operations through AI and software automation. A decade-long venture capitalist at Accel who backed companies like PagerDuty, Heptio, and ServiceChannel, Doyle made the leap to operator in 2024. Treeline - backed by $25 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz - is building what Doyle calls a 'modern IT operating system': an AI-first alternative to the legacy managed service provider model that still powers most of the world's corporate IT infrastructure.
Bogomil Balkansky
Bogomil Balkansky is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, observability, and enterprise SaaS. Born in Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied mathematics at Cornell University before earning an MBA from Stanford GSB. He spent eight years at VMware growing server virtualization revenue 10x and expanding the customer base from 5,000 to 300,000, was an early employee at Bebop (acquired by Google for $397M), then led go-to-market for Google Cloud's Recruiting Solutions. He joined Sequoia in 2020 and has backed companies including Vanta, Wiz, Temporal, Chainguard, Pydantic, and Mutiny. Known for his intuition-driven investment style and deep connections across the Bulgarian and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.
Grey Baker
Grey Baker is a Cambridge-educated mathematician turned software entrepreneur best known for bootstrapping Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling it to GitHub in 2019, then growing GitHub Advanced Security to $140M ARR. A former McKinsey consultant who taught himself to code in six months, cycled 30,000km around the world between startups, and co-founded YC S23 company Pincites (AI contract negotiation, acquired by Filevine in 2025), he now serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.
Jason Risch
Jason Risch is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he bets early on founders reshaping cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. A Stanford math-and-statistics graduate who grew up tracking baseball statistics in Marin County, Risch cut his professional teeth at McKinsey, Opendoor, and Andrew Ng's AI Fund before joining Greylock in 2019. He approaches every investment like an applied statistician - 'shifting the distribution to increase a founder's odds of success' - and has backed breakout companies including Wiz, Cribl, LlamaIndex, Kodem, and Blockaid.
Wayne Goeckeritz
Wayne Goeckeritz is a seasoned cybersecurity channel executive serving as Security Channel Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he supports the firm's Go-To-Market Network across venture teams. With a career spanning decades in IT channel sales, he has held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, Crossbeam, NetWitness, Prolexic, Demisto, Palo Alto Networks, Siemplify (acquired by Google Cloud), and SentinelOne, building a reputation as one of the most impactful channel leaders in the cybersecurity industry.
Ernest Addison
Ernest Addison is a Senior Associate at Boldstart Ventures, one of the premier enterprise-focused seed-stage VC firms, where he backs founders at the earliest inflection point. With a career that spans Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America's Global Industrials investment banking desk, and private equity at Audax Group, Ernest brings a rare mix of Wall Street rigor and startup-native intuition to enterprise infrastructure, security, developer tools, and SaaS. Originally from Washington, D.C. and a UVA McIntire alum, he joined Boldstart in 2021 and has since become a fixture in the firm's mission to be the first check into ambitious technical founders.
Trevor Perrin
Trevor Perrin is an applied cryptographer who co-created the Signal Protocol with Moxie Marlinspike - the encryption backbone now protecting conversations for over a billion people across Signal, WhatsApp, and beyond. He also designed the Noise Protocol Framework, a foundational cryptographic framework deployed in WireGuard, WhatsApp's client-server layer, and the Lightning Network. A 2017 Levchin Prize winner, Perrin works as an independent consultant on quantum readiness and cryptographic systems design.
Scott Weiss
Scott Weiss is a Silicon Valley veteran who was employee #13 at Hotmail, co-founded and sold IronPort Systems to Cisco for $830 million, and joined Andreessen Horowitz as its fourth general partner in 2011. Known for candid writing about leadership, parenting, and the hard trade-offs of startup life, he stepped back from new investments at a16z in 2016 to prioritize family before his three children left for college.
Arif Janmohamed
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners with over 16 years backing enterprise AI, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS companies. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate and Wharton MBA, he has been the first institutional check behind companies like Netskope (Nasdaq: NTSK, IPO 2025) and Navan, and was on the Moveworks board from Day 1 through its $2.85B acquisition by ServiceNow in 2025. A Canadian with Ismaili-East African roots, fluent in French, and a self-taught ice hockey player, Arif blends deep technical fluency with a founder-first philosophy - often describing himself as part coach, part psychologist to the entrepreneurs he backs. As of early 2026, he is stepping back from day-to-day Lightspeed duties to launch a new early-stage investment firm.
Martin Casado
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's infrastructure practice. A Spanish-born computer scientist and entrepreneur, he pioneered software-defined networking (SDN) by inventing the OpenFlow protocol during his Stanford PhD. He co-founded Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion in 2012, where he then scaled the networking and security business to $600 million in annual revenue. An ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award winner, Casado now invests in cutting-edge infrastructure and AI companies, serving on boards of over a dozen startups while shaping the future of enterprise technology and AI regulation policy.
Astasia Myers
Astasia Myers is a General Partner at Felicis, a 10x Forbes Midas list honoree, and 4x New York Times Top 20 VC who invests in early-stage AI, infrastructure, and developer tools companies. She previously founded Quiet Capital's enterprise practice, backing Modal, Chroma, and Langchain, and led investments in unicorns like LaunchDarkly at Redpoint Ventures. With dual degrees from Stanford and a master's from Cambridge, she's partnered with 10 unicorns and achieved 9 IPOs, bringing over a decade of enterprise software experience from startups, equity research at Baird, and Cisco's corporate development team.
Shruti Gandhi
Shruti Gandhi is the General Partner and Founding Engineer of Array Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing technical founders building enterprise data, AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools. A former IBM engineer turned startup founder turned VC, she made the leap from Mumbai to Manhattan to the Bay Area armed with a Columbia CS degree and a Chicago Booth MBA. With 100+ investments, 15+ exits (to Apple, Amazon, PayPal, ServiceNow, and others), and 25,000+ Substack subscribers, she is one of a vanishingly small cohort of women of color who raised and run their own VC fund - and she teaches AI at Columbia on the side.