Secure Ventures with Kyle McNulty

Zain Rizavi is co-founder and CEO of Cimento. Cimento provides phishing simulation and security awareness training to protect the human workforce from falling for malicious attacks. Zain might be the first ex-VC I've interviewed on the podcast, as he spent the last four years of his career focused on cyber at Ridge Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners. Before his time in VC, he spent four years at Cloudflare. The inspiration is clear with the number of references he made to Cloudflare philosophy over the course of the conversation. In the episode we discuss everything from company structuring to beat the innovator's dilemma, the lessons he learned from his time in VC, and the nuance of the security awareness training market.

Website: https://cimento.ai/

Karthik Kannan is Founder and CEO of Anvilogic.

Anvilogic provides a multi-data platform SIEM that allows enterprise security operations centers to decouple their threat detection and analytics from where their data is actually stored, helping customers avoid vendor lock-in and high ingestion costs. Before founding the company in 2019, Karthik spent time at Splunk after the acquisition of Caspida, where he led business development. This gave him a front-row seat to the fundamental data challenges facing traditional security teams. Now, Anvilogic has raised over $85 million from investors including Evolution Equity Partners and Foundation Capital.
In the episode, we discuss Karthik's transition from an industry incumbent to a startup founder, the shifting economics of security data, and how Anvilogic is helping defenders regain control of their infrastructure.

anvilogic.com

Kibu is a digital trust layer providing infrastructure for identity verification for peer to peer connections. Using the Kibu app, individuals can assure themselves they are communicating with the intended party as opposed to an AI deepfake or a criminal impersonating someone. Before Kibu, Ari had a very atypical career for a cyber founder. He started a podcast called "Millennials don't Suck", and he leveraged that into a production company for other media. He then started a bootstrapped software company during COVID, and he is now hitting the cycle with a venture-backed cyber company, starting Kibu to improve trust for remote communications. In the episode we discuss everything from "serendipity-maxing" to how digital trust changes with AI.

Website

Happy BlackHat to those who celebrate!

Andy Smith is founder and CEO of Tracebit. Tracebit sells a cyber deception platform to lure attackers into targeting intentionally vulnerable targets, giving valuable information to defenders. Andy argues that as AI-driven attacks increase in exploit speed and complexity, deception will play more of a role than ever to provide early detection to defenders. Before Tracebit, Andy worked as a developer, including head of engineering at Tessian which was acquired by Proofpoint in 2022. In the episode we touch on his thesis for improved deception, his bike trip down the west coast of the US, his descent into cold outreach, including how he is successful, and more.

Gianni Cuozzo is founder and CEO at Exein. Exein is an OT and IoT security company providing enhanced endpoint monitoring, and the company has really hit its stride in the last couple of years having raised 100M euros in late 2025. As Gianni talks about in the episode, it’s been a long journey. He started his career in the intelligence community like some of the other OT security greats like the founders of Dragos, Claroty, and Armis. But when he started Exein in 2018, the market was not yet ready for his product. He knew that the adoption of new generation, more capable OT devices would present new security tooling opportunities, and he was willing to be patient for that moment. In the episode we discuss OT security dynamics, market timing, positioning as deep tech vs cyber, and more.