Simbian is a mission-driven AI security company based in Mountain View, CA, backed by Silicon Valley investors, and founded by serial security entrepreneurs. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Simbian co-founder and CEO Ambuj Kumar to learn more about his background and the company.
Ambuj Kumar’s Background
What is Ambuj Kumar’s background? Kumar said:
“My name is Ambuj Kumar, and I’m co-founder and CEO of Simbian. I was a lead engineer at NVIDIA, building multiple generations of the GPUs there. I then got interested in security and ended up creating a new security category, Confidential Computing, and raised $135 million for a successful startup.”
“I have a B. Tech degree from IIT Kanpur (Gold Medalist) and an M.S. from Stanford University. I like dabbling in multiple technologies and have more than 100 patents.”
Formation Of Simbian
How did the idea for Simbian come together? Kumar shared:
“People have been working on AI for a few decades but the ability of large language models to solve general purpose problems was hard to miss. I immediately saw the cybersecure problems that a well-trained precision AI Agent could solve. Of course for me, it was like full circle – using those very GPUs that I had built many years ago for automating cybersecurity.”
“Security is ever so dynamic. Hackers will always find new gaps in security, which defenders will then rush to fix. As the IT landscape changes, security evolves. This dynamic nature means security teams are always struggling with finding people trained in the ‘latest thing.’ AI has the potential to augment humans in security in a fundamental way.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Kumar reflected:
“Good one! A constant source of frustration among security practitioners is incessant threat advisories, which are public notices of security problems. When you see an advisory, your immediate reaction is to want to know if I am impacted by this advisory. But, finding that answer requires hours or sometimes days of research. Simbian has built an AI Agent for Security Operations that automates this process to seconds. Once we were showing this demo to a customer, and they couldn’t believe their eyes. It’s so fun to see our product making people’s lives so much better.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kumar explained:
“Simbian is building a suite of AI Agents for various security tasks. Simbian Security Accelerator is our platform that hosts these AI Agents and provides them with helpful context for the security tasks at hand. Humans are always in control and can use our AI Agents to automatically take care of a variety of security tasks for which they couldn’t find or afford human talent. For example, our SOC AI Agent can take a threat advisory, build a TPP from it, search your environment for those compromises, and even put a plan together for remediation. Our GRC Agent on the other hand can automatically take an incoming security review questionnaire and respond to answers to those questions, freeing up valuable time of security engineers.
We seem to have hit the holy grail of providing better security, and at the same time helping save costs, which is something that resonates really well with out customers in this environment.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Kumar and the team faced in building the company? Kumar acknowledged:
“Today’s LLMs hallucinate and are unreliable. They will confidentially and silently give a wrong answer. Our whole thesis was about using LLMs to automate security, but this inaccuracy posed an existential threat. Even a simple mistake can create havoc in security. If AI shuts down the wrong application, or blocks the wrong network port, or gives access to the wrong employees, the result can be extremely damaging.”
“We came to a unique and innovative idea to address these challenges – wisdom of the crowd! We created a game where we incentivized people to find limitations of these LLMs and then we used these findings to make a robust system. Hundreds of people play our ‘Are you Smarter than an LLM’ game on simbian.ai/smarter-than-llm every day and help us.”
Evolution Of Simbian’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Kumar noted:
“We started with just a handful of integrations, now we cover a much broader range of technologies. Similarly, our capabilities in automating security operations have increased. We can allow customers to operate in co-pilot mode but also build pieces that work fully autonomously.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Kumar cited:
“Raising an oversubscribed seed round. We set out to raise a small fund, but ended up raising over a $10m round. Dozens of successful business leaders joined us, including Bharat Shah (ex-CVP Microsoft), Olivier Pomel (Co-founder/CEO of Datadog), Pankaj Patel (Co-founder/CEO of Nile), Diogo Monica (co-founder Anchorage), etc.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Kumar about customer success, he highlighted:
“Axelar labs, a unicorn financial services company, is using Simbian to automate their cloud security tools.”
Funding
When asking Kumar about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We secured a $10m+ seed fund, priced round.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Kumar assessed:
“Security services is about $75 billion. Our TAM is bigger than that because a reliable machine is much more valuable than a human operator because it works tirelessly.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Kumar affirmed:
“We are the only company building fully autonomous AI Agents that not only find issues or vulnerabilities but actually go eliminate them! We believe we can have humans control security – where goals and policies are set by humans but we use AI to implement and realize those goals. We are automating the entire security of an organization. We have multiple patents pending on our technology. We have an innovative approach in making AI robust and reliable.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Kumar pointed out:
“Cybersecurity is no longer about protecting our money and online information. Everyone is hurting. Bad guys are now attacking hospitals and water plants. Everyone is hurting, We will scale our Go-To-Market to reach a wider set of customers.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Kumar concluded:
“We have a very unique founding team. We have people who built NVIDIA GPUs, who built Microsoft Security, and those who built early AI models.”
