# Umaimah Khan

> Umaimah Khan is the co-founder and CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity security company building the controls that decide who - and increasingly what - can access an organization's systems. A homeschooled math kid who entered MIT at 16 and fell for cryptography, she did research embedded with government agencies including DARPA, then engineered infrastructure and security at two startups that became unicorns. She founded Opal in 2020 to treat authorization as the hard technical problem she believes it is, and has raised roughly $32M, including a $22M Series B in December 2023. Opal's customers include Cloudflare, Figma, Databricks, Scale AI, Grammarly and Perplexity.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Opal Security
- **Organizations:** Opal Security, MIT, DARPA
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BS in Mathematics and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Opal Security, raising approximately $32M including a $22M Series B., Built an identity security platform adopted by Cloudflare, Figma, Databricks, Scale AI, Grammarly and Perplexity., Entered MIT at 16 and earned a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science.

## Career timeline

- **Early career** — Cryptography and pure-math research at MIT; entered MIT at 16 after being homeschooled.
- **Government** — Researcher in the federal government, embedded with agencies including DARPA on emerging technology.
- **Startups** — Led infrastructure and security engineering at two startups that went on to become unicorns, in analytics and health.
- **2020** — Co-founded Opal Security and became CEO, after roughly two years of conversations about the gap in identity and access management.
- **2023-12** — Closed a $22M Series B funding round, bringing total raised to about $32M.
- **2025** — Spoke at the Official Cybersecurity Summit (Silicon Valley) and appeared on the NYSE floor; positioned Opal for the AI and agentic-identity era.

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Opal Security, raising approximately $32M including a $22M Series B.
- Built an identity security platform adopted by Cloudflare, Figma, Databricks, Scale AI, Grammarly and Perplexity.
- Entered MIT at 16 and earned a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science.
- Conducted federal research embedded with agencies including DARPA.
- Helped build and scale infrastructure and security at two startups that became unicorns.

## Latest updates

- **2025-02** — Spoke at the Official Cybersecurity Summit (Silicon Valley) on identity security.
- **2025** — Appeared on the NYSE floor representing Opal Security; framed AI-era access as 'the Wild West.'
- **2023-12** — Announced a $22M Series B funding round for Opal Security.

## Links

- Website: https://opal.dev
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/umaimahk

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/umaimah-khan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-11