By Mike Armistead, CEO & Co-founder, Pulse Security AI
I’ve spent the last 23 years in security. Building products, watching markets evolve, talking to hundreds of CISOs about what actually keeps them up at night. And for years, I kept hearing the same thing said in different ways:
“I’m constantly chasing expectations from peers, execs, and boards who each hold a different picture of my program and its value. I need a strategic narrative grounded in reality, not another dashboard or a bucket of parts cobbled together by my people.”
And here’s the quieter truth underneath it: many of these leaders expect that their program is working, but they can’t prove it, and they can’t confidently tell you the gaps to acceptable risk. Further, they are just beginning to see how agentic systems can automate program-level processes currently executed by their staff - and how these systems can boost productivity and scale. However, the most common “modus operandi” continues to be firefighting the latest crisis in an ever-evolving landscape.
By contrast, consider other executives in the organization. A CFO formulates strategy, automates key workflows (e.g. reconciliations) and communicates status largely based on an ERP system, such as SAP or Oracle; a CRO does the same using CRM as a basis of truth; the HR executive relies upon their HR system. It’s a different story for a CISO. There’s no automation of procedures, and certainly no shared, queryable record of decisions, exceptions, precedents, and risk trade-offs. CISO rely on “human middleware” to fill the gaps - and it’s expensive, inconsistent, and cannot scale.
The industry has poured billions into better tools for practitioners: threat detection, incident response, vulnerability management. Every layer of the technical stack has been instrumented, automated, and optimized. But almost nothing exists for the person who runs the program itself, the leader accountable for strategy, operations, vision, and earning the respect of peers in the C-suite and the confidence of the board of directors.
That’s the gap we’re closing with Pulse.
The Platform
Pulse Security AI is building an AI-native platform for security leaders to modernize their function. At its core is a context graph that integrates the full scope of a company and its security program — stitching together structured and unstructured information, incorporating risks specific to that organization, and institutionalizing memories of decisions that occur hundreds of times a week. The platform’s agentic-based procedures sit above the deep, practitioner-focused tool silos and automates program-level tasks, offering unprecedented scale, speed, and consistency to workflows. Core management capabilities help track, optimize and communicate program initiatives, workstreams, and risk monitoring.
Why Now?
Organizations, their Boards, and security teams chartered to mitigate cyber risk are more exposed than ever. Mythos and other AI-driven advances threaten to dump thousands of attacker-visible vulnerabilities on unprepared security teams. SEC disclosure rules have raised the stakes for directors who can’t demonstrate real visibility into their security posture.
Creating a system for the CISO demands more than simple collection of records and manual workflow tracking. The rise of AI-based systems offers collection, analysis and automation. AI agents can execute program-level workflows that used to consume entire teams: reconciling control coverage, drafting board narratives, tracking exceptions, and chasing down evidence for audits. The work that took senior staff members and their team a week now takes an agent a few minutes, with a consistency humans can’t match at scale.
Who We Are
Pulse was founded by a team that built and scaled security companies before and we are especially versed in operational and institutional AI. We’ve shipped category-defining products, sat across the table from the CISOs we now serve, and felt the friction of this problem from both sides. We know what it takes to build durable security infrastructure, and we know what it feels like when the tools fall short of the moment.
We’re grateful to be backed by Foundation Capital and Zetta Venture Partners, whose conviction and early thinking on context graphs has given depth to communicating our approach.
We’ve also been fortunate to build alongside world-class design partners who span industries and organizational complexities and a community of security leaders in the Security Impact Circle. Your honest conversations have shaped everything about how we think about this problem. Thank you.
What Comes Next
If you’re a CISO, Deputy CISO or Security Chief of Staff feeling the growing pressure to keep pace with the speed, scope, and persistence of modern attackers while answering sharper questions from your board and fellow executives, we built this for you. Two ways to go deeper:
Get a Demo — Request an introduction and demo. If you are interested in learning more about our platform, give us a shout.
Join the Security Impact Circle — Our Chatham House rules community of security leaders is working through these questions in the open.
Start the journey. Elevate your cybersecurity program.
— Mike
