We're building a safer AI Powered World by empowering a community of ML security researchers, finding unique exploits, and providing tools that to reduce risk inherent in MLOps pipelines. MLSecOps puts security at the heart of ML design, enabling ML developers to continue rapidly innovating while protecting against unique ML vulnerabilities.
"We saw a gap between an enterprise’s AI and cybersecurity organizations. Protect AI will be the catalyst to collapse the silos between those teams to help them build safer, more secure AI systems to dramatically reduce enterprise risk."
— Badar Ahmed, Co-founder and CTO

Our Story
Leadership

Ian Swanson
CEO and Founder
Ian Swanson
CEO and Founder
Most recently, Ian was an Amazon Web Services Worldwide Leader for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning responsible for go-to-market across the entire AWS portfolio reaching 100K customers. Prior to Amazon, he was Vice President of Machine Learning at Oracle. In this role, Ian oversaw the strategy for Oracle’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning products. Prior to Oracle, Ian was CEO and Founder of DataScience.com which was acquired by Oracle in May 2018. DataScience.com provided an industry-leading enterprise data science platform that combined the tools, libraries, and languages data scientists loved with the infrastructure and workflows their organizations needed. Forrester had ranked DataScience.com’s ML Ops platform as the number one solution in 2018. Earlier in his career, Ian was an executive at American Express, Sprint, and CEO of Sometrics. Sometrics launched the industry's first global virtual currency platform in 2008 and was acquired by American Express in 2011.

Daryan (D) Dehghanpisheh
President and Founder
Daryan (D) Dehghanpisheh
President and Founder
Prior to founding Protect AI with Mr. Swanson, D was the Global Leader for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Solution Architects, under Mr. Swanson. His team was responsible for customer facing engineering resources that helped the AI/ML business of AWS become the largest AI/ML business in the world. Prior to Amazon, D was Sr. Vice President of Digital Strategy at Howard Hughes Corporation where D built an industry leading AI platform to price and model economics of illiquid assets using advanced ML techniques in 2015. Previous experiences included Sr. Vice President and Managing Director of Technology and Data Products at NYSE, which was acquired by ICE in May 2013. Prior to NYSE, D was at Intel Corporation for over 12 years where his roles included building the first financial services vertical team and delivering over $1B of annual revenue contribution from the group, Chief of Staff and Technical Advisor to the global sales and marketing organization, and a variety of other leadership roles in product, sales, and marketing functions.

Badar Ahmed
CTO and Founder
Badar Ahmed
CTO and Founder
Prior to founding Protect AI, Badar was the Director of Engineering at Oracle Cloud where he built the first ML service (OCI Data Science). His teams were responsible for multiple products such as ML Notebooks, Model Catalog, and Model Deployment. Prior, Badar was engineering lead at DataScience.com, acquired by Oracle, and had worked at Caltech on the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) project in collaboration with CERN, where he built high performance data transfer and storage tools for petabyte-scale data. Badar's research group at Caltech contributed to the Nobel prize winning Higgs boson discovery in 2012.

Ed Sim
Board Member
Ed Sim
Board Member
Ed is founder of boldstart ventures, a day one partner and true believer for developer first, crypto infra and SaaS founders. boldstart collaborates with technical founders well before writing their first line of code or making their first hires, leads pre-product rounds at company formation, and helps accelerate their path to product market fit.
Ed has been in the trenches with Snyk, Blockdaemon, Kustomer (sold to Meta), BigID, Superhuman, Security Scorecard, Front and so many more from day one. Other notables where Ed is actively involved on the board as director or observer include Jit Security, Slim, Env0 and Spectro Cloud. Ed also co-founded MState in 2017, an enterprise blockchain lab in partnership with IBM, where seed investments include Fireblocks and Amberdata.
Prior to boldstart, Ed was a co-founder of Dawntreader Ventures where he led day one investments in Greenplum (sold to EMC, Pivotal - IPO), GoToMeeting (sold to Citrix), and LivePerson (IPO). He is a true partner from day one - helping bold founders start, scale, exit and have fun along the way.

Mark Kraynak
Board Member
Mark Kraynak
Board Member
Mark Kraynak is a technology executive, company builder, and erstwhile poet/engineer.
He has held a number of marketing, product, corporate and development and strategy roles. Mark has led or co-led investments in At-Bay, Aqua Security, Cato Networks, CipherTrace, Coin Metrics, EdgeImpulse, Exabeam, Silverfort and System, He has also been an advisor to Exabeam, Indegy, Kloudless, Trustar and Aqua Security.
Mark has led or co-led investments in At-Bay, CipherTrace, Integris, Indegy, Kloudless, Orkus, Petabyte, Silverfort, Trustar, EvidentID, and Aqua Security. He is currently also an advisor to Exabeam, Indegy, Kloudless, Aqua Security, and Trustar.
Earlier in his career, he provided technology architecture consulting for Fortune 500 clients with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement.
Institutional Investors
It's proven that shifting security as far left as possible at the point of software or model creation results in reduced vulnerabilities and increased velocity. The time is now for MLSecOps. We're thrilled to back the team at Protect AI as they not only have the domain experience but also a deep understanding and empathy for the end user having created the world's first security engine embedded in a data scientist's workflow.
Boldstart Ventures
Pelion watched the founders successfully help create the market of ML Ops by building DataScience.com into an industry leader. ML Ops is helping thousands of enterprises transform their businesses with scaled AI capabilities. Now, we must all help make these environments more secure. Pelion is excited to support Protect AI in leading the new cybersecurity category of MLSecOps and helping enterprises meet the coming challenges of Secure AI.
Pelion Venture Partners
ML is an entirely new class of applications and underlying infrastructure, just like mobile web, IOT, and Web3. Security for new application ecosystems follow the same arc: knowledge of vulnerabilities, followed by the ability to find them, then adding contextual understanding and prioritization, then finally automated remediation. Protect AI will enable this end to end arc for AI systems.
Acrew Capital
Angel Investors and Advisors

Shlomo Kramer
CEO, Cato Networks
Shlomo Kramer
CEO, Cato Networks
Shlomo is an information technology entrepreneur and investor—the founder and CEO of Cato Networks, the world’s leading single-vendor SASE platform.
Shlomo has been honored with various awards, including CEO of the Year by SC Magazine in 2008, one of 20 luminaries who changed the network industry by Network World in 2006, and was inducted into the InfoSec Hall of Fame in 2013. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University.

Andrew Peterson
CEO, Signal Sciences
Andrew Peterson
CEO, Signal Sciences
Andrew is an acclaimed and recognized founder, board member, advisor, and investor in Information Security. As CEO and Co-Founder of Signal Sciences, Andrew led the company in the creation of their industry-defining technology platform to protect websites/mobile apps/APIs ultimately leading to the $825M sale to Fastly in under 8 years.
Prior to Signal Sciences, Andrew has been building leading edge, highly performing product and sales teams across five continents for 20 years with such companies as Etsy, Google, and the Clinton Foundation. He also authored a book with O’Reilly publishing called "Cracking Security Misconceptions" to encourage non-security professionals to participate in organizational security. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Science, Technology, and Society.

Nir Polak
CEO, Exabeam
Nir Polak
CEO, Exabeam
Nir Polak is the co-founder and CEO of Exabeam, and has 18 years of experience in information security, including executive experience setting company strategy, driving execution, building new products, and bringing them to market. While at Imperva, Nir set the company product strategy and launched and managed the worldwide services organization.
Nir also held engineering positions at Adjungo Networks (acquired by Flash Networks) and Shopping.com (acquired by eBay). He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in computer sciences from The Interdisciplinary Center in Israel.

Dan Plastina
Former VP of Security at Amazon Web Services
Dan Plastina
Former VP of Security at Amazon Web Services
Dan is an advisory board member of Protect AI and former Vice President and Head of Security Services at AWS. Prior to that, he served for 26 years in a variety of security roles at Microsoft. He currently advises a number of leading companies in security and can be found on LinkedIn.

Dimitri Sirota
CEO, BigID
Dimitri Sirota
CEO, BigID
Dimitri Sirota is the CEO and co-founder of one of the first enterprise privacy management platforms, BigID, and a privacy and identity expert. He is an established serial entrepreneur, investor, mentor and strategist, and previously founded two enterprise software companies focused on security (eTunnels) and API management (Layer 7 Technologies), which was sold to CA Technologies in 2013.

Jessica Souder
Director of Expansion
Jessica Souder
Director of Expansion