Simbian brings AI to existing security tools

Ambuj Kumar is nothing if not ambitious.

An electrical engineer by training, Kumar led hardware design for eight years at Nvidia, helping to develop technology including a widely used high-speed memory controller for GPUs. After leaving Nvidia in 2010, Kumar turned to cybersecurity and eventually co-founded Fortanix, a cloud data security platform.

It was while leading Fortanix that he came up with the idea for Kumar’s next venture: an AI-powered tool to automate a company’s cybersecurity workflows, inspired by challenges he observed in the cybersecurity industry.

“Security leaders are stressed,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “CISOs don’t last more than a few years on average, and security analysts have the highest turnover.

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 operate existing security tools, finding the right configurations for each product, taking into account an enterprise’s security priorities and thresholds, informed by its business requirements.

With Simbian’s chatbot-like interface, users can type a cybersecurity goal in natural language, have Simbian provide personalized recommendations, and generate what Kumar describes as “automated actions” to execute the actions (in the best way possible). possible).

“Security companies have focused on improving their own products, which leads to a very fragmented industry,” Kumar said. “This results in a greater operational burden on organizations.”

For Kumar, research shows that cybersecurity budgets are often wasted on an overabundance of tools. More than half of companies feel that spent around 50% of their budgets poorly and it still cannot remediate threats, according to research cited by Forbes. A separate study found that organizations now juggle, on average, 76 different security toolsmaking IT teams and leaders feel overwhelmed.

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“Security has been a cat and mouse game between attackers and defenders for too long; the attack surface continues to grow due to the growth of IT,” Kumar said, adding that “there is not enough talent to go around.” (Recent research from Cybersecurity Ventures, a security-focused venture capital firm, estimates that the Shortage of cyber experts will hit 3.5 million people by 2025.)

In addition to automatically configuring a company’s security tools, the Simbian platform attempts to respond to “security events,” allowing customers to drive security while taking care of lower-level details. This, Kumar says, can significantly reduce the number of alerts security analysts must respond to.

But this assumes that Simbian’s AI does not make mistakes, a difficult task given that it is well-established that AI is error-prone.

To minimize the potential for off-track 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 ​​does 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 fair, it’s unclear how many people actually played the company’s game; Kumar declined to say.

There are privacy implications for a system that controls other systems, especially those related to security. Would companies – and vendors, for that matter – be comfortable with channeling sensitive data through a single, centralized, AI-controlled portal?

Kumar says every attempt has been made to protect against data compromise. Simbian uses encryption – customers control the encryption keys – and customers can delete their data at any time.

“As the customer, you have complete control,” he said.

While Simbian isn’t the only platform trying to layer AI 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, Aditya Singh, partner at Cota Capital, Icon Ventures, Firebolt, and Rain Capital.

“Cybersecurity is one of the most important issues of our time and has a notoriously fragmented ecosystem with thousands of vendors,” Rajaram told TechCrunch in an email. “Companies have tried to build expertise around specific products and issues. I applaud Simbian’s method of building an integrated platform that would understand and operate all security. While this is an extremely challenging approach from a technological standpoint, I will put my money behind – and I bet my money – on Simbian. It’s the team with unique expertise, from hardware to cloud.”

Mountain View-based Simbian, which has 15 employees, plans to put most of the capital raised into product development. Kumar aims to double the size of the startup’s workforce by the end of the year.