Ambuj Kumar is nothing short of ambitious.
An electrical engineer by training, Kumar led hardware design for eight years at Nvidia, helping develop technologies including a widely used high-speed memory controller for GPUs. After leaving Nvidia in 2010, Kumar moved into cybersecurity and eventually co-founded Fortanix, a cloud data security platform.
It was while running Fortanix that the idea for Kumar’s next venture came to him: an AI-based tool for automating a company’s cybersecurity workflows, inspired by the challenges he observed in the cybersecurity sector.
“Security people are stressed,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “CISOs don’t last more than two years on average, and security analysts experience the highest churn rates. And things are getting worse.
Kumar’s solution, which he co-founded with former Twitter software engineer Alankrit Chona, is Simbian, a cybersecurity platform that effectively controls other cybersecurity platforms as well as security applications and tools. Leveraging AI, Simbian can automatically orchestrate and leverage existing security tools, finding the right configurations for each product taking into account an organization’s security priorities and thresholds, informed by its business requirements.
With Simbian’s chatbot-like interface, users can enter a cybersecurity objective in natural language, then ask Simbian to provide personalized recommendations and generate what Kumar describes as “automated actions” to execute the actions (from best he can).
“Security companies have focused on improving their own products, which leads to a very fragmented industry,” Kumar said. “This translates into a higher operational burden for organizations. »
To echo Kumar’s point, surveys show that cybersecurity budgets are often wasted due to an overabundance of tools. More than half of companies estimate they have misspent about 50% of their budget and still fail to remediate threats, according to a survey cited by Forbes. A separate study found that organizations now juggle an average of 76 different security tools, leading IT teams and executives to feel overwhelmed.
“Security has long been a cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders; the attack surface keeps growing due to the growth of IT,” Kumar said, adding that there is “not enough talent to go around.” (A recent survey from Cybersecurity Ventures, a security-focused venture capital firm, estimates that the shortage of cyber experts will reach 3.5 million people by 2025.)
In addition to automatically configuring an organization’s security tools, the Simbian platform attempts to respond to “security events” by allowing customers to drive security while taking care of lower-level details. According to Kumar, this can significantly reduce the number of alerts that security analysts must respond to.
But that assumes that Simbian’s AI doesn’t make errors, which is a tall order, given that it’s well established that AI is error-prone.
To minimize the risk of derailed behavior, Simbian’s AI was trained using a crowdsourcing approach: a game on its website called “Are you smarter than an LLM?” ” – which tasked volunteers with trying to “trick” the AI into doing the wrong thing. Kumar explained that Simbian used this learning, along with internal researchers, to “ensure the AI is doing the right thing in its use cases.”
This means that Simbian has effectively outsourced some of its AI training to unpaid players. But, to be honest, it’s unclear how many people actually played the company’s game; Kumar wouldn’t say anything.
A system that controls other systems has privacy implications, especially those related to security. Would businesses – and suppliers, for that matter – be comfortable with transmitting sensitive data through a single centralized portal controlled by AI?
Kumar says everything has been done to protect against data compromise. Simbian uses encryption (customers control the encryption keys) and customers can delete their data at any time.
“As a customer, you have complete control,” he said.
Although Simbian is not the only platform attempting to apply an AI layer on top of existing security tools (Nexusflow offers a product along the same lines), it appears to have won over investors. The company recently raised $10 million from investors including Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram, Cota Capital partner Aditya Singh, Icon Ventures, Firebolt, and Rain Capital.
“Cybersecurity is one of the most important issues of our time and has fragmented the ecosystem with thousands of vendors,” Rajaram told TechCrunch via email. “Companies have tried to develop expertise around specific products and problems. I applaud Simbian’s approach to creating an integrated platform that would understand and leverage all security. Although it is an extremely difficult approach from a technological point of view, I will put my money – and I have put my money – on Simbian. This is a team with unique experience, from hardware to cloud.
Mountain View-based Simbian, which has 15 employees, plans to spend most of the capital raised on product development. Kumar aims to double the size of the startup’s workforce by the end of the year.
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