Ashish PopliFounder and CEO
Red teamer, security engineering at Microsoft, machine learning systems at Google, then CISO three times. Investor and advisor to 10+ security startups.
Connect on LinkedInWhy we exist
- I broke into systems for a living.
Red teaming taught me that exploitability depends on conditions, not just on a vulnerable version being present.
- Then I became the buyer.
Three CISO roles, at companies growing from early revenue through IPO. The gap between what tools report and what’s actually exploitable never closed. Log4j made it visceral: a war room, five teams asking at once, and conditions checked by hand across hundreds of resources.
- So we built the product.
Machine learning, generative AI and graph modeling finally caught up with the problem. Vulnerability management isn’t an operations problem; it’s a product problem. Defendermate is that product.
