Pulse Security AI has raised $8 million in seed funding and launched from stealth with an operational management platform designed to help chief information security officers oversee cybersecurity programs, automate workflows and communicate business risk to executives and boards. Foundation Capital led the funding round, with participation from Zetta Venture Partners. Pulse plans to use the capital to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams as it responds to demand from enterprises seeking a more centralized way to manage cybersecurity operations.
The company is addressing what it sees as a longstanding gap in the security technology market. While security operations center analysts, threat hunters, vulnerability management teams, and other practitioners have access to specialized technical tools, CISOs often continue managing the broader security program through spreadsheets, slide presentations, disconnected policies, and institutional knowledge held by individual employees.
Pulse is developing a management layer that connects these fragmented sources and provides security leaders with a continuously updated view of their organizations’ security posture, operational priorities, regulatory obligations and business risks.
The platform is designed to function as a system of record for the cybersecurity program, similar to how enterprise resource planning systems support finance departments and customer relationship management platforms help revenue teams organize customer information and workflows.
Pulse integrates with the security tools that companies already use across endpoint detection and response, cloud infrastructure, identity management, and other technical areas. It also connects with unstructured information stored in assessment reports, policy documents, communications, and tracking spreadsheets.
The platform organizes these sources through a context graph architecture that maps relationships among risks, systems, controls, regulations, employees, and business priorities. This consolidated foundation is intended to help CISOs assess the health of their programs, formulate strategies, and identify areas requiring attention.
Pulse also provides agentic infrastructure that allows security professionals and AI agents to work together on program-level tasks. The system can execute procedures, document decisions, and automate workflows while maintaining a record of how actions were completed.
By preserving operational context, Pulse aims to reduce the manual effort required to gather information, reconcile findings, and prepare reports for management teams, regulators, and boards of directors.
The platform is not intended to replace the technical systems already used by cybersecurity teams. Instead, Pulse sits above those tools and combines their outputs with business, governance, and institutional information that is often difficult for security leaders to access in one place.
The company believes this approach can help CISOs move beyond reactive reporting and manage cybersecurity programs with clearer priorities, greater consistency and more current information.
The need for this type of infrastructure is increasing as security teams face a growing number of vulnerabilities and shorter response timelines. Pulse cited National Institute of Standards and Technology data showing that Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures submissions increased by 263% between 2020 and 2025.
VulnCheck identified 884 newly exploited vulnerabilities during 2025, with nearly 29% exploited on or before the date on which the related vulnerability was publicly disclosed.
Advances in artificial intelligence are also accelerating the discovery and validation of vulnerabilities, giving security teams less time to assess potential threats and coordinate responses.
At the same time, cybersecurity has become an increasingly important boardroom and regulatory issue. Public companies face disclosure requirements regarding material cybersecurity incidents and risk management practices, placing greater pressure on executives and directors to understand how technical security conditions could affect operations and financial performance.
Security leaders are frequently expected to translate information from multiple technical systems into business-level explanations. However, organizations often lack a unified system connecting vulnerabilities, controls, and security incidents with financial risk, regulatory exposure, and strategic priorities.
Pulse conducted more than 80 interviews with CISOs while developing the platform. A recurring concern was the lack of an authoritative and continuously updated source of information that security leaders could confidently present to boards, executive colleagues, and regulators.
Without a centralized management layer, security teams may depend heavily on employees to collect data, interpret conflicting information, and manually connect findings across tools. Pulse describes this process as human middleware because employees are responsible for performing the integration work that software systems do not handle.
This fragmented approach can add administrative burden, create inconsistent reporting, and make it more difficult to determine whether security investments are producing measurable improvements.
Pulse aims to provide security leaders with real-time program visibility while reducing manual work across governance, reporting, and operational coordination.
The company was co-founded by CEO Mike Armistead, Robert Hipps, and Nick Gilligan, a team with experience building and scaling cybersecurity and artificial intelligence companies.
Armistead and Hipps previously co-founded Respond Software, an AI-driven security operations automation company acquired by FireEye and Mandiant for $186 million in 2020.
Before launching Respond Software, Armistead co-founded Fortify Software, which helped establish the application security category and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2010.
Gilligan was one of Respond Software’s first technical employees and later led AI engineering teams at Mandiant and Google.
The founders’ prior experience in security operations and AI informed Pulse’s focus on the executive and program management side of cybersecurity. Rather than creating another detection or monitoring product for individual practitioners, the company is building infrastructure for the leaders who coordinate the entire security organization.
Pulse’s investors believe this gap represents a significant opportunity because many processes involved in managing cybersecurity programs still rely on manual work, despite the increasing complexity and importance of the function.
Foundation Capital previously invested in Respond Software and has worked with members of the Pulse founding team. Zetta Venture Partners focuses on AI-native companies and is supporting Pulse as it expands the use of AI agents across cybersecurity management workflows.
Pulse plans to continue developing capabilities that help CISOs understand program health, connect security information with business priorities and communicate decisions more clearly across their organizations.
The company’s broader goal is to give cybersecurity leaders the same operational foundation available to executives overseeing finance, sales and other major business functions.
KEY QUOTES:
“Security teams often get lost in technical complexity, but CISOs must remain focused on overarching business risk. Success requires a clear understanding of a security program’s health and the ability to translate technical data into strategic insights. The industry has long needed a system of record that provides ground truth, transforming daily operations into meaningful, business-driven intelligence.”
Brett Wahlin, CIO of Aurora
“We were fortunate to work closely with the Pulse team through our early investment in Respond, so I know they can deliver real transformation in security. The problem Pulse addresses is massive, expensive and still solved largely by human effort. CISOs face accelerating risks that siloed technologies cannot address. At the same time, the CISO role within a company has been elevated to include regular board engagement. Pulse’s agentic platform gives security leaders the strategic command they have been missing to present a comprehensive picture of their program.”
Sid Trivedi, Partner at Foundation Capital
“Security leaders today are expected to make high-stakes decisions across an increasingly complex organization, yet most still operate across fragmented tools, endless workflows and incomplete visibility. Mike, Robert and this team have a proven track record of building category-defining companies.”
Apoorva Pandhi, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners
“The security industry has spent decades building better tools for practitioners and almost nothing for the leader who runs the program. A CFO reconciles finances through an ERP. A CRO captures tribal knowledge with a CRM. Security leaders have never had the equivalent. Pulse is the foundation they need to run their programs the way other functions leverage their management systems to gain clarity, speed and communicate effectively.”
Mike Armistead, CEO and Co-Founder of Pulse Security AI
