shadow-ai
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Wojciech Blaszak
Wojciech Blaszak is the co-founder and CEO of Golf (YC X25), a San Francisco company building a security and governance control plane for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the layer where AI agents connect to company data. He started his first business at 14, grew it to around $200k in revenue, and left university after a single semester to build full-time with his longtime collaborator Antoni Gmitruk. Golf began as an open-source framework for shipping production MCP servers and grew into an enterprise product that discovers shadow AI, enforces per-tool policies, and produces compliance-ready audit trails.
Russell Spitler
Russell Spitler is co-founder and CEO of Nudge Security, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that helps organizations discover and govern the sprawl of SaaS and AI apps employees adopt on their own. He previously ran product strategy at AT&T Cybersecurity and AlienVault, where he co-founded the Open Threat Exchange, one of the largest open threat intelligence communities in the world. In November 2025, Nudge Security raised a $22.5 million Series A led by Cerberus Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $39 million.
Casey Bleeker
Casey Bleeker is the co-founder and CEO of SurePath AI, a Denver-based startup that helps enterprises adopt generative AI without leaking their secrets to it. He built the company in 2023 around a simple bet: companies will not choose between banning AI and losing control of their data, so SurePath sits at the network edge, governing what employees send to public models and redacting what they should not. Before founding SurePath, Casey ran CDW's $2B+ Cloud and Cloud Native business and held senior roles at Cisco in AI/ML, IoT, and developer advocacy. He is a computational-biology major turned go-to-market operator who codes his own prototypes, and online he is better known as 'geekbleek.'
Vinay Goel
Vinay Goel is the CEO and co-founder of Wald.ai, a Palo Alto startup building contextual data-loss protection for the age of generative AI. After more than 30 years in product and technology - a decade at Google leading Maps and Local, then top product roles at JLL, Kiavi, Check Point and Webroot - he co-founded Wald.ai in 2024 to solve the 'shadow AI' problem: employees feeding sensitive company data into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Wald.ai redacts sensitive data inline, lets the AI answer, then restores the original context before the user sees it. He raised a $4M seed round in December 2024 and sits on the Forbes Technology Council.
Sean Murray
Sean D. Murray is the CEO of Productiv, the AI Portfolio Governance platform that gives enterprise IT teams real-time visibility over every SaaS and AI application running in their organization - including the ones nobody approved. A 20-year revenue and sales leadership veteran, Murray spent years building go-to-market engines at CEB (now Gartner), Xactly Corp, SalesLoft, and Greenhouse Software before stepping into the CEO seat at Productiv in April 2024. He now leads a 160-person company backed by IVP, Accel, and Norwest - on a mission to turn shadow AI from an enterprise liability into a managed capability.
Alastair Paterson
Alastair Paterson is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonic Security, a San Francisco-based startup building language models that protect enterprise data as employees pour it into generative AI tools. He previously co-founded Digital Shadows in a London kitchen in 2011 and ran it for eleven years through to its $160M acquisition by ReliaQuest in 2022. A Bristol-trained engineer who cut his teeth at BAE Systems Detica, he is now back on his second cybersecurity company, this one wagering that coaching beats blocking.