
A weekend security tool escaped its creator's laptop, found a global community, and became Truffle Security. Ayrey's real trick was learning that the history developers delete can be more revealing than the code they keep.
Xiaochen Zou, who publishes as Eten (ETenal) and signs his work with the Chinese name 笑尘, is a Linux kernel security researcher turned founder. He earned a PhD in cybersecurity at UC Riverside under Zhiyun Qian, building automated tools that discovered dozens of kernel vulnerabilities, then worked as a security researcher at Microsoft before co-founding Nebula Security (YC S26), an AI-native cybersecurity company where he serves as CEO. Nebula pairs elite human hackers with an autonomous agent, VEGA, that finds bugs, writes proofs of concept, and proposes patches.
Zakir Durumeric is a computer security researcher, Stanford assistant professor, and co-founder and CEO of Censys. As a University of Michigan PhD student he built ZMap, a scanner that can survey the entire public IPv4 internet in minutes rather than weeks, then turned that research into Censys, an internet intelligence platform used for threat hunting and exposure management. His work mapping the internet at scale helped expose the reach of vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and earned him a spot on MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35.