Kumar’s Bold New Vision: Revolutionizing Cybersecurity with AI-Powered Automation
With a foundation in electrical engineering, Kumar spent eight years at Nvidia, where he played a key role in hardware design, contributing to innovations like a widely adopted high-speed memory controller for GPUs. Leaving Nvidia in 2010, he ventured into cybersecurity and eventually co-founded Fortanix, a cloud data security platform.
While leading Fortanix, Kumar recognized a critical need in the cybersecurity world: an AI-powered tool to automate cybersecurity workflows. This revelation led to his next big project.
“Security leaders are under immense pressure,” Kumar shared with TechCrunch. “Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) typically last only a few years, and the churn rate among security analysts is extremely high. The situation is worsening.”
In response, Kumar, alongside former Twitter software engineer Alankrit Chona, co-founded Simbian, an innovative cybersecurity platform. Simbian is designed to seamlessly manage other cybersecurity platforms and security applications. By harnessing AI, Simbian orchestrates and optimizes existing security tools, tailoring configurations to align with a company’s specific priorities and security thresholds.
Simbian’s intuitive, chatbot-like interface allows users to input their cybersecurity goals in plain language. The platform then provides personalized recommendations and generates automated actions to implement these strategies.
“Most security companies focus on enhancing their own products, leading to a fragmented industry,” Kumar explained. “This fragmentation increases the operational burden on organizations.”
Research supports Kumar’s point: many companies waste significant portions of their cybersecurity budgets on redundant tools. Surveys indicate that more than half of businesses believe they’ve misspent around 50% of their budgets and still struggle to mitigate threats. Another study highlights that organizations manage an average of 76 security tools, leaving IT teams feeling overwhelmed.
“Cybersecurity has long been a cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders, with the attack surface expanding due to IT growth,” Kumar said. “There’s also a severe shortage of cybersecurity talent, projected to reach 3.5 million unfilled positions by 2025.”
Simbian not only configures security tools automatically but also manages “security events,” allowing customers to direct security efforts while the platform handles the minutiae. This significantly reduces the number of alerts security analysts must address.
However, the effectiveness of Simbian’s AI hinges on its accuracy. Recognizing that AI can be error-prone, Simbian adopted a unique training approach. Through a crowdsourced game called “Are you smarter than an LLM?” volunteers attempted to trick the AI into making mistakes. This data, combined with in-house research, helped refine the AI’s decision-making.
Despite outsourcing part of its AI training to unpaid gamers, Kumar assured that privacy and data security remain paramount. Simbian employs robust encryption, with customers maintaining control over their encryption keys and the ability to delete their data at any time.
“As a customer, you have full control,” Kumar emphasized.
While Simbian isn’t the only platform applying AI to cybersecurity—Nexusflow offers a similar product—it has gained significant investor confidence. The company recently secured $10 million from investors including Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram and Cota Capital partner Aditya Singh.
“Cybersecurity is one of the most critical challenges of our time, with a notoriously fragmented ecosystem,” Rajaram told TechCrunch. “Simbian’s approach to creating an integrated platform that comprehends and manages all aspects of security is bold and technologically challenging. I believe in their vision and have invested accordingly.”
Based in Mountain View, Simbian currently employs 15 people and plans to double its workforce by the end of the year, focusing heavily on product development.
