'The Wild West': Opal Founder Umaimah Khan On Security In An AI Era
AI has sped up the clock on security risks within an organization. In a wide-ranging video interview, math whiz and Opal Security co-founder and CEO Umaimah Khan explains how.
The Upshot
Umaimah Khan wasn’t expected to become an identity security startup founder.
“People would ask me, ‘Why are you working in identity security with your background? That’s so boring, what is wrong with you?’” Khan says.
The math and cryptography whiz had spent years working on difficult problems at MIT, and embedded with government agencies including DARPA, which works with emerging tech. She’d transitioned from that to engineering roles at two now-unicorns in analytics and health. So… security tools for authorizing users at Opal Security? Why?
“This is the hardest problem in security, period. I believe that,” Opal’s co-founder and CEO says. “It requires building something that can reason, that can be dynamic, that can scale.”
Founded in 2020, Opal has raised $32 million to date, including a $22 million Series B funding round in December 2023. Key customers already include tech high-flyers including Cloudflare, Figma, and AI standouts Perplexity and Scale AI. You’ll also find Databricks and Grammarly on its website.
For June’s Upstarts Live video interview, Khan joined us to talk about her story and the security state-of-play in the era of AI.
Highlights include:
The scale of this risk: “Our bigger customers will see North Korean state actors impersonate legitimate employee flows.”
How the rise of AI agents is speeding up the security clock and raising the urgency bar: “30 minutes is game over for most agents”
How identity and data are the new table stakes: “Only two broad categories of security that are fundamentally standing the test of all this thrash, which are identity and data: who, and what.”
Why identity security today is like equities trading without quants: “People had a really hard time believing that trading could change with math or better systems.”
Upstarts editor Alex Konrad’s video interview with Khan can be watched in full below. We also chatted with Khan afterward to double-click on a few most important themes, shared as text highlights.
Programming note: Upstarts is in London next week, speaking at London Tech Week’s Investor Forum and hosting our own event with the subject of our popular first profile, CEO Chris Pedregal. Local founder and investor subscribers: last call to sign up to join us for breakfast with Granola.