Progress update #1
July–September 2026
Confidential · Please do not forward without permission
Preview
Hi everyone,
Welcome to Kumio’s first progress update, and thank you for staying in touch. We’ll use these updates to share our progress, explain our focus, and make it easy to reconnect.
This quarter:
Nearly $1M committed in angel capital
Three key hires and a new six-member advisor bench spanning data centers, infrastructure finance, and leadership
Our core internal agent platform is live, with the customer dashboard underway
Pilot, partnership, and research momentum creating commercial opportunities
Next: Ship our customer dashboard, expand AI-security research capacity, convert an opportunity into revenue, advance enterprise readiness, and prepare for our $5M institutional pre-seed. Introductions across the data-center ecosystem and to aligned investors would be especially helpful.
Progress by the numbers
~$1M
Angel committed, on a $500K target
3
Key hires this summer
6
Advisors on the new bench
57
Countries in the DPRK research
Prologue: the angel round
From $500K target to nearly $1M committed
As we identified several key hires we wanted to make and began the compliance-certification work required to sell into enterprise environments, we decided to raise a small angel SAFE before heading into an institutional pre-seed. We opened the round in late June with a $500K target. It was oversubscribed within days and expanded beyond the original target; we now have nearly $1M committed.
We are especially proud of the mix of people around the table: individual angel investors and fund managers with backgrounds at Point72, Verition, Citadel, Millennium, and Brevan Howard, investing in their personal capacities, alongside data-center operators, experienced founders, and longtime supporters who backed us before the story was fully formed. Their conviction gave us the resources to expand the team, accelerate product development, support pilot delivery, and begin the enterprise-readiness work required for larger customers.
We are deeply grateful. The money matters, of course. But the network, operating judgment, credibility, and willingness to make introductions may prove even more valuable.
People
The team and advisors behind Kumio
We added three key people to the founding team this summer:
Felipe Solferini
Principal AI Security Engineer
Felipe brings deep offensive-security and AI expertise to the agents, research, and customer work at the heart of Kumio's platform.
Bernadette Bal
Senior Product Engineer · Formerly Microsoft Identity
Bernadette is helping turn Kumio's technical depth into a customer-facing product experience that is clear, useful, and enterprise-ready.
Anna Sian
Founding Marketing Lead · Formerly Spotify
Anna is leading Kumio's brand, messaging, website, and go-to-market storytelling, making sure the outside world understands what the technical team is building.
Together, they are accelerating the two things that matter most right now: turning Kumio’s technical edge into a product customers can adopt, and building the market presence that helps us reach those customers.
We also assembled a distinguished advisor bench spanning data-center operations, infrastructure finance, military logistics and leadership, and company-building:
Pete Marin
CEO & Chairman, T5 Data Centers
Doug Fleit
CEO & Co-founder, PowerHouse Data Centers
Chris Baughman
Chief Data Center Officer, Atmosphere Data Centers; formerly Meta
Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Siegl
Former Director of Logistics & Engineering, U.S. CENTCOM; 57th Quartermaster General, U.S. Army
Dimitris Pagonakis
CEO & Co-founder, Sesame Vault; formerly Point72 and Citadel
Joseph Kim
Partner, AGC Equity Partners
Together, this network brings exposure to hundreds of data centers and billions of dollars of infrastructure development. More importantly, they help us pressure-test the product against the way data centers are actually designed, financed, built, and operated.
Product & technology
Since the angel round, Kumio has moved from early agent experiments to a functioning internal platform and the first version of a customer-facing experience:
Core AI-security platform: We moved from early agent experiments to a live internal platform that uses specialized security agents to expose real attack paths, prioritize vulnerabilities, and guide remediation across critical environments.
Reusable security expertise: We are turning Kumio’s research and customer-engagement knowledge into repeatable specialists, skills, and workflows.
Customer experience: The first dashboard is moving through design and pilot feedback, with a focus on making complex findings clear, actionable, and easy to validate.
Frontier ecosystem access: Kumio has been accepted into OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue program, Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program, and NVIDIA Inception, giving us valuable access, credibility, and support as we build at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.
Together, these advances are bringing us closer to a differentiated platform that uses offensive security testing to expose real attack paths, prioritize vulnerabilities, and guide remediation across critical environments.
Pilots & partners (GTM)
Our pilots and partnerships are beginning to show credible paths to signed MSAs, paid engagements, and repeatable partner channels:
Energy software and controls pilot: We completed testing across energy software and control systems, the same classes of operational technology that support power and resilience in data-center environments, and are discussing the next phase of paid work.
Industrial real-estate portfolio: We are discussing initial facility assessments with a large property owner, with the potential to develop a repeatable security program across multiple sites.
International channel opportunities: We are exploring partnerships with technology, consulting, and supplier-assurance organizations that could extend Kumio’s reach across critical infrastructure and connected hardware.
Enterprise readiness: SOC 2 readiness is underway, supporting enterprise procurement and the conversion of pilots into paid deployments.
International public-sector interest: Vangelis’s Black Hat research and the coverage that followed led government representatives and cybersecurity leaders to initiate exploratory conversations about critical infrastructure, frontier AI models, and nation-state threat research.
Press (newsworthy)
From attention to advantage
The press generated by Vangelis and Felipe’s talks at Black Hat and DEF CON is already translating into stronger product intelligence, faster customer trust, and better access to the buyers and partners Kumio needs to reach.
At Black Hat, Vangelis presented research tracing DPRK-linked operations affecting 1,640 organizations across 57 countries. At DEF CON, his kids’ smartwatch research showed how an ordinary connected device could be turned into a surveillance tool.
The talks and coverage move Kumio forward in three concrete ways:
Customer trust: Critical-infrastructure and enterprise buyers can see that Kumio is being built by practitioners who understand sophisticated attackers firsthand, not by a team wrapping a generic model in a security pitch.
Product advantage: The techniques, attack paths, and lessons from this research feed the domain knowledge we are organizing into Kumio’s agents and reusable security skills, including connected-hardware and nation-state scenarios.
Market access: The coverage, particularly in South Korea, has already led to government outreach and warmer conversations with potential customers, partners, and technology programs.
Selected coverage:
Pre-seed raise
We are preparing to launch a $5M institutional pre-seed to accelerate paid adoption, product development, and enterprise delivery.
If you think Kumio may be a good fit for someone in your network, we would be glad to connect ahead of the raise. Contact us at invest@kumio.ai.
Alliance for SoCal Innovation: We were accepted into the SoCal Venture Pipeline in August, giving Kumio access to a network of more than 300 institutional investors and eligibility for a potential $250K Catalyst Fund investment in the priced round.
Priorities (30–60 days)
The next 30 to 60 days are about turning the progress above into visible product milestones and commercial traction:
Bring Kumio to customers. Launch the first dashboard and give pilot partners a clearer, more actionable way to experience the product.
Expand our AI-security advantage. Continue strengthening the platform, research, and reusable expertise behind Kumio’s agents.
Deepen our data-center focus. Turn growing ecosystem momentum into high-value customer and channel opportunities.
Convert traction into revenue. Move the strongest pilots and commercial conversations toward paid relationships.
Build for enterprise scale. Advance the security, compliance, and delivery capabilities required by larger customers.
Please (asks)
We would value warm introductions that can shorten the path to customers, channel partners, or aligned investors.
We would especially value introductions across the full data-center ecosystem:
Design and commissioning: Firms, owner’s representatives, MEP engineering firms, and controls integrators.
Operators and developers: Infrastructure owners and their CISOs, OT leaders, and security teams who are willing to explore a design partnership or scoped pilot.
Infrastructure vendors: Providers across power, cooling, building controls, networking, physical infrastructure, and backup systems.
Channel partners: Firms with established relationships across data centers, industrial facilities, or connected hardware.
Aligned investors: Early-stage investors focused on cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, data centers, or critical infrastructure.
A short, direct email introduction is perfect. If helpful, we can provide a forwardable email blurb and supporting materials to make the introduction easy; we will take it from there.
P.S. With gratitude
Thank you for following Kumio’s journey and for the conversations, feedback, and introductions along the way.
Since we last spoke, we have expanded the team, advanced the product, built a stronger network of advisors, and created new paths to customers and partners.
We are energized by where things stand, and even more excited about what comes next.
With gratitude,
Jinhee and the Kumio team
Kumio · Progress update #1