Ahikam Kaufman spent most of his career in the Bay Area. After becoming a CPA, he started his career as CFO at a startup company. Over time, he has been giving multiple opportunities to not only serve finance, but serve business roles as well - which prepared him for his own entrepreneurial path. IE starting 3 companies and exiting one to Intuit. Outside of tech, he enjoys traveling the world, spending time with his family, and hiking. But, he notes that the demands of being a business owner limits the amount of time he spends in these things.

Ahikam started to think about how automation can positively impact financial operations, specifically around managing data in the office of the CFO. After the first AI models were released, he got excited, realizing that these models would continue to get better and better, alongside operating with agency.

This is the creation story of Safebooks.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://safebooks.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahikam-kaufman-688310/

Volodymyr Sydorenko lives in London, and collects mechanical keyboards. His most unusual hobby is that he does clay sculptures of characters, or random people at times. He has 2 cats, and likes to spend time outdoors. In fact, in 3 weeks time from this recording, he will traveling to Switzerland to do the Via Ferrata. To add to all of this, he has started to write children's books and hopes to publish them someday.

Vitalii Sydorenko currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He is into sports, loves to hit the gym and regularly tracks his calories. Last year he started playing tennis and finds that he can't stop. He enjoy hiking, which is great in Lisbon. And in the past, he spent many years building startups, exiting, and also in venture capital

You may have noticed that Volodymyr and Vitalii have the same last name... that is because they are brothers. As kids growing up, they did a lot of boxing together, as well as cling to classic films like Back to the Future.

Fourteen years ago, Volodymyr got interesting in building solutions, and realized he could only get so far by himself... so he decided to build a team to deliver these solutions. Two years ago, Vitalii and Volodymyr started to consider all the of the shifts in the SDLC, and what that meant for the current business. Vitalii decided to bring his prior startup and VC experience and join the team.

This is the creation story of Gearheart.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://gearheart.io/
• https://codestory.co/podcast/e6-jon-darbyshire-smartsuite/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gearheart/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/vitalii-sydorenko-%F0%9F%92%AA%F0%9F%87%BA%F0%9F%87%A6-24b4ba35/

Volodymyr Sydorenko lives in London, and collects mechanical keyboards. His most unusual hobby is that he does clay sculptures of characters, or random people at times. He has 2 cats, and likes to spend time outdoors. In fact, in 3 weeks time from this recording, he will traveling to Switzerland to do the Via Ferrata. To add to all of this, he has started to write children's books and hopes to publish them someday.

Vitalii Sydorenko currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He is into sports, loves to hit the gym and regularly tracks his calories. Last year he started playing tennis and finds that he can't stop. He enjoy hiking, which is great in Lisbon. And in the past, he spent many years building startups, exiting, and also in venture capital

You may have noticed that Volodymyr and Vitalii have the same last name... that is because they are brothers. As kids growing up, they did a lot of boxing together, as well as cling to classic films like Back to the Future.

Fourteen years ago, Volodymyr got interesting in building solutions, and realized he could only get so far by himself... so he decided to build a team to deliver these solutions. Two years ago, Vitalii and Volodymyr started to consider all the of the shifts in the SDLC, and what that meant for the current business. Vitalii decided to bring his prior startup and VC experience and join the team.

This is the creation story of Gearheart.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://gearheart.io/
• https://beyondthewow.io
• https://codestory.co/podcast/e6-jon-darbyshire-smartsuite/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gearheart/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/vitalii-sydorenko-%F0%9F%92%AA%F0%9F%87%BA%F0%9F%87%A6-24b4ba35/

Tim Lidman lives in Denver, CO. He has had an unconventional path to being a Tech CEO. In fact, He moved from London to Sweden when he was 18... to try to be a heavy metal rock star, trying to make it big as a drummer. To earn extra income, he got into tech sales - which went really well. Eventually, he worked with WebEx (around the time it got bought by Cisco), for Success Factors (when they got bought by SAP), and then eventually, doing his own startup (which eventually got bought by Accenture). Outside of his professional life, he is married with 2 girls. From his music years, he extracts skills that drove his success to date, which is the ability to product development and execution down the same way you do music.

In the days of his first startup, Tim's solution was used by consulting firms to power client engagement. Post exit, while overseeing things at Accenture, he noticed that the whole industry was powered by Microsoft files (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc.) - IE, driven manually. He started to wonder if he could codify the consulting process, to remove the manual burden.

This is the creation story of Clyde.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://meetclyde.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/timlidman/

Today, we are dropping another episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

Wallarm is the AI Control Platform for Enterprise AI, protecting every AI workload, API, and application in production, giving CISOs the governance they need and CIOs the speed they demand. Organizations choose Wallarm for a complete inventory of APIs, AI agents, and AI apps, patented AI/ML-based threat detection and blocking that operates at production traffic speeds.

We all know that you can't secure what you can't see, which is why AI discovery is a first principle for AI security, but what's really required for AI discovery? It's more than just LLMs and agents. Today's episode is entitled AI Discovery isn't just AI, and joining us is Tim Ebbers, Field CTO at Wallarm. Tim and I discuss the real requirements for AI discovery, and why the connections between assets and infrastructure are part of the puzzle.

Questions

• Security teams often say, “You can’t secure what you can’t see.” In the context of AI, what exactly do they need to see?
• What supporting infrastructure matters most when mapping AI risk, such as APIs, cloud services, Kubernetes workloads, data stores, identities, and external integrations?
• Where does shadow AI typically appear first inside an enterprise environment? How can it be prevented?
• How do relationships between assets change the risk picture? For example, why does it matter which API an agent can call or which data source a workflow can reach?
• What makes AI discovery harder than traditional application or cloud asset discovery? What are the similarities and differences?
• How should organizations prioritize what they find? Is every AI asset equally risky?
• What does “continuous discovery” mean in a world where AI services can be deployed, connected, or changed in minutes?
• Once an organization has visibility into its AI footprint, what’s next? What are the biggest gaps in today’s AI security programs?

Links

• https://www.wallarm.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/tebbers/

Full Abstract

Most security teams know that you can't secure what you can't see. In the context of AI, that rule turns out to be a lot harder to satisfy than it sounds.

AI discovery isn't just a matter of cataloging your LLMs and agents. The real picture includes the APIs those agents call, the data sources they reach, the infrastructure they run on, and all the AI that got deployed without anyone telling security. Building that picture requires understanding relationships, not just inventories, because risk doesn't live in assets in isolation. It lives in what those assets can do together.

In this episode, Tim Ebbers, Field CTO at Wallarm, examines what a complete AI control loop actually requires at the discovery stage: what needs to be visible, why the connections between assets change the risk calculation, where shadow AI tends to appear first and how it becomes unmanaged risk, and what makes AI discovery structurally different from traditional cloud or application discovery. It also looks at what organizations should do once discovery is in place, and where the biggest gaps remain in AI security programs today.

If your team is building toward continuous AI governance, this is where that work starts.

Gregory M. Kurtzer is a veteran open-source pioneer, technologist, and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in high-performance computing (HPC) and large-scale enterprise infrastructure. He first gained widespread industry prominence as the co-founder of CentOS Linux, which grew into one of the world's most ubiquitous enterprise operating systems, and he later created other foundational open-source projects like the Warewulf cluster management toolkit and the Singularity (now Apptainer) container system.

In 2020, Gregory founded his current venture, with the goal of modernizing infrastructure stacks for the cloud and AI era. He and his team recognized that traditional enterprise infrastructure was too fragmented and ill equipped to handle the next generation of data intensive computing.

This is the creation story of CIQ.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://ciq.com/
• https://rockylinux.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gmkurtzer/