Xiid is a cybersecurity company focused on zero-trust connectivity, post-quantum security, AI-driven environments, and critical infrastructure. Its flagship Terniion platform is designed to eliminate inbound listening ports and keep protected resources non-addressable from the public internet. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Xiid CEO and Co-Founder Steve Visconti to learn more about the company’s security architecture, the evolution of Terniion, and its approach to securing AI and critical infrastructure.
Scott Visconti’s Background
When asked about his background, Visconti shared:
I bring over three decades of experience at the forefront of networking and cybersecurity, shaped by each major wave of infrastructure innovation.
I started my career coding in IBM mainframe environments, then moved into early LAN technologies with pioneers like Banyan Systems and Chipcom during the hub-and-switch era.
In the 1990s, I helped build the foundation of the modern internet with Ascend Communications, and later played a key executive role in scaling enterprise wireless networking at Airespace, culminating in its acquisition by Cisco Systems.
Today, as CEO and co-founder of Xiid, I’m focused on driving the next evolution of secure connectivity with zero trust and post-quantum architectures for SOCs, AI-driven environments, and critical infrastructure, continuing a career centered on anticipating and shaping the future of network security.
How Xiid Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Visconti explained:
Xiid was founded based on the realization that traditional networking and security architectures, designed decades ago, were fundamentally incapable of handling the modern threat landscape.
Our vision was to eliminate an entire class of attack surface: network reachability.
Instead of continually improving the defenses around an exposed resource, we asked a different question: why should an unauthorized party be able to reach that resource in the first place?
By moving away from inbound listening ports and traditional VPNs, we aimed to create a solution where resources are invisible to the public internet, leading to the development of our flagship Terniion security control platform.
Favorite Memory
When asked about his favorite memory working for the company so far, Visconti said:
In an early whiteboard discussion with Federico Simonetti, CTO and co-founder of Xiid, he said, “I want to invent something that none of my colleagues or hackers around the world would know how to begin to attack, let alone breach it.”
I remember thinking that Federico wasn’t talking about building a better firewall or another VPN. He was questioning the basic assumption that a protected resource needed to be reachable in the first place.
That idea became foundational to Xiid, and we’re now beginning to see its relevance well beyond remote access — particularly in OT, critical infrastructure and AI systems.
We are starting to see that play out now.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Xiid’s core products and features, Visconti detailed:
Our core offering is Terniion. Key features include:
- True Zero-Trust Connectivity: Terniion establishes authorized communication between specific users, processes and workloads without exposing the protected resource for inbound network access.
- Unreachable Resources: Terniion eliminates open inbound ports and the need for a static public IP address. Resources stay behind the firewall. There are no listening ports, making them invisible to scanners and unauthorized actors. And there’s no DNS discovery.
- Post-Quantum Readiness: We architected Terniion to remain secure, even against the future threat of quantum computing.
- Identity-Centric Access: This innovative platform also offers integration with existing identity access management providers while using Aclave, Xiid’s credential-less authentication, ensuring only authenticated users can establish outbound-only connections.
Legacy Network Security Challenges
When asked about recent challenges in the sector and how Xiid has addressed them, Visconti explained:
A primary challenge is the industry’s lack of understanding about the risk associated with relying on legacy network security.
The problem? VPN-style architectures still require an open door, in the form of a port, to function.
We overcome this by demonstrating to organizations the risk of any open port, no matter how well guarded, and proving through our deployment that a resource cannot be hacked if it cannot be found.
Another challenge is the rise of AI-driven reconnaissance.
AI dramatically lowers the cost of reconnaissance and allows attackers to discover and analyze exposed infrastructure at machine speed. Our response is architectural: minimize what an attacker can discover and, more importantly, what they can reach.
How The Technology Has Evolved
When asked how Xiid’s technology has evolved since launching, Visconti said:
Xiid technology has evolved from a specialized secure tunnel, SealedTunnel, to a comprehensive Terniion platform and framework.
While we began by focusing on simple secure remote access, we have expanded to support complex AI-driven environments, autonomous security operations center (SOC), cloud-native CI/CD, and container environments.
Our latest iterations have prioritized “stealth” for critical infrastructure, ensuring that operational technology (OT) environments can be managed remotely without exposure to the network or WAN.
Key Company Milestones
When asked about some of Xiid’s most significant milestones, Visconti highlighted:
- The Transition to Terniion: Successfully rearchitecting our core networking stack to support post-quantum security, world-class orchestration and automation tools, and true zero-trust principles which are translating into commercial environments, particularly OT, industrial systems and AI infrastructure.
- One of our most important milestones was proving that the architecture could operate in highly demanding government and defense environments. That forced us to demonstrate that this wasn’t simply an interesting cybersecurity concept — it could satisfy real operational and security requirements.
- Our Strategic Pivot to Critical Infrastructure: Xiid has expanded our footprint into protecting power grids and utility sectors where air-gapped security is often a hypothetical ideal rather than a reality.
- Xiid’s Major Enterprise Deployments: We continue moving from early-stage proofs of concept to protecting high-value SOC, DevSecOps, and OT environments for global organizations.
Customer Success Stories
When asked to share specific customer success stories, Visconti said:
Xiid has cultivated an expansive and deeply loyal customer and partner base since our launch in 2018, earning lasting trust through consistent results, innovation, and exceptional service.
Here are just a couple of examples of our successful collaborations:
Portainer.io: Xiid recently entered into a technology partnership with Portainer.io to make distributed container infrastructure used in enterprise IT, industrial, and IoT deployments easier to manage and harder to attack.
The new, unified edge-to-command architecture integrates Portainer.io edge computing with Xiid’s Terniion deterministic network security to flatten the network, dramatically reduce operational costs, accelerate deployment times to just weeks, and is designed to provide deterministic enforcement, policy-driven isolation, and resistance to external network attack paths.
Consent Vault: By deploying Terniion, Consent Vault safeguards its advanced AI systems along with its entire healthcare network, ensuring robust security for community and specialty clinics, clinical and research personnel, and the sensitive patient data being analyzed and shared.
We do this by keeping AI data ingestion pipelines, data lakes, and document stores non-addressable from the internet while still fully usable.
Patient data and AI workloads move only through outbound, process-to-process, triple-encrypted tunnels, dramatically reducing breach risk without changing how clinicians or patients use the system.
Funding
When asked about funding and revenue metrics, Visconti explained:
Xiid was self-funded for its first two years while we developed the initial technology behind Terniion and Aclave. Following COVID, we raised approximately $5 million in seed capital from a group that includes experienced technology executives and industry veterans.
We don’t disclose private-company revenue, but the important transition for Xiid has been from technology development into production use across commercial enterprise and public-sector environments.
But I can share that we are showing success with both public sector and private commercial enterprise customers, many of which are public companies.
Total Addressable Market
When asked about the total addressable market Xiid is pursuing, Visconti said:
It’s large because we’re having great success in cloud workload/VPC security, a $34 billion to $46 billion market; DevSecOps security, a $10 billion to $12 billion opportunity; and the container/Kubernetes security space, which is pegged at $2 billion to $3 billion.
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Security: The global M2M security market is valued at $30.37 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $54.4 billion by 2035.
Broader Operational Technology (OT) Security Market: Valued at approximately $26.3 billion to $27.39 billion in 2026, with projections to reach $58.9 billion to $88.7 billion by 2031–2033.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Xiid from its competition, Visconti explained:
Most “zero trust” competitors still rely on a broker or a gateway that must listen for connections.
Xiid is different. Our approach ensures:
- Zero-listening ports with no static IP: The Xiid solution involves absolutely no inbound traffic for access.
- No data interception: Unlike SASE or SSE providers that decrypt and inspect traffic in their cloud, Terniion ensures data remains private and unknown, even to us.
- Unparalleled simplicity: We remove the need for complex firewall rules and static IPs.
Future Goals
When discussing Xiid’s future goals, Visconti concluded:
AI is introducing a new security problem: autonomous attack paths.
While traditional attack paths relied on compromised credentials, lateral movement, and vulnerable endpoints, autonomous attack paths emerge through API chaining, interconnected AI agents, inherited trust relationships that expand faster than governance processes can track, and machine identities with excessive permissions.
When AI systems create dynamic connectivity paths and machine identities outnumber human users, the traditional detect-and-respond cybersecurity model breaks.
In an AI world, organizations must reduce the autonomous attack surface.
Meanwhile, organizations are facing quantum risk today and tomorrow, because data can be stolen now and decrypted later.
That means organizations need to protect against both traditional and quantum-enabled cyber threats.
And they must get started with that now.
Xiid empowers companies to do both.
Our ambition is for Terniion to become a foundational secure communications layer for this next generation of infrastructure-from AI and autonomous systems to OT, critical infrastructure and defense.
To achieve that, we are focusing on deeper integration into AI-driven automation workflows and expanding our presence in the defense and critical infrastructure sectors.
