Pangea Founder & CEO, Oliver Friedrichs, Answers 10 Questions for Every Startup Founder

Welcome to HackerNoon’s Ten Questions for Startup Founders Interview series! Want to share your startup story? Take the interview HERE!

1. Describe your company in 2–5 words

Security guardrails for AI applications

2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?

AI adoption is exploding - companies are building hundreds of AI applications across their organizations, but this rush creates massive security risks around data leakage, prompt injection, and sensitive information disclosure. Traditional security tools aren't equipped for these new threats. Companies need comprehensive security guardrails that can be deployed wherever their AI is - whether through APIs, network gateways, or self-hosted solutions. Our platform provides these critical protections while maintaining speed to market.

3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team brings decades of cybersecurity expertise from companies like Splunk, Cisco, Symantec, and McAfee. We've worked together before - most recently helping pioneer the SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) category. We understand both the enterprise security landscape and how to build developer-friendly solutions. Most AI security startups come from AI backgrounds - we bring deep cybersecurity expertise to solve these emerging challenges.

4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I've been in cybersecurity since the late 90s, starting as an ethical hacker focused on exploration rather than malicious activities. That led to the founding of multiple security companies - each addressing the next wave of security challenges. The evolution from network security to cloud security and now AI security keeps presenting new frontiers that need protecting.

5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

We measure success by how effectively we're helping companies secure their AI applications across various deployment models. Beyond traditional metrics like revenue growth, we track security threats detected and blocked, ease of integration and most importantly - customer impact. When organizations tell us we make secure AI development "an easy and obvious choice" - that's real success.

6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

Pangea is a unified security platform for AI software that lets engineering teams rapidly embed enterprise-grade security capabilities into their applications through straightforward API integrations and allows security and AI teams to deploy these capabilities via network gateways.

Our mission is to democratize security, removing the complexity that traditionally prevents smaller teams and startups from implementing robust protection. Whether you're building a mobile app, web service, or enterprise software, Pangea gives you instant access to authentication, threat intelligence, user management, and compliance tools - without requiring deep security expertise.

We serve organizations and developers who want to build secure, compliant software without having to become cybersecurity experts themselves.

7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Nearly two-thirds of our customers already have AI-powered apps in production. We've recently launched Pangea AI Guard and Prompt Guard, demonstrating our ability to rapidly address emerging security challenges. We've also secured strategic partnerships with CrowdStrike and backing from Google Ventures and Okta Ventures, validating our comprehensive approach to AI security.

8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?

With estimates showing over one million software companies by 2027, many leveraging AI, we're positioned to be the go-to platform for securing these applications. We're expanding our deployment options beyond APIs to meet customers wherever their AI is - whether in the cloud, on-premise, or at the network edge. The market is rapidly evolving from RAG architectures to agentic AI, and we're building the security foundations for both.

9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

One of our first paying customers is an F100 company that I am not permitted to disclose, however, I can talk about early adopter, Grand Canyon Education, a publicly-traded technology and services company serving dozens of universities.

They chose Pangea to secure their internal AI chatbot platform and needed to protect sensitive student and medical data while maintaining ease of use. Our ability to provide instant security controls without impacting user experience was key to their decision. We're seeing rapid growth as more companies realize security needs to be built into their AI applications from day one.

10. What’s your biggest threat?

Our biggest challenge isn't competition - it's education. Many companies are just beginning to understand the security risks in their AI applications. They often focus on functionality first, only to realize later they need comprehensive security controls. We need to help companies understand that security can't be an afterthought with AI - it needs to be built in from the start through a comprehensive set of guardrails because the scale, velocity, and autonomy of AI technology means it has the real potential to magnify security risks beyond anything we’ve seen before.