Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei (Part 1)

Aimei talks about the Cyber Analytics space and how her company analyzes the entire attack surface. It’s a hard problem, and she explains the nuances of technical and go-to-market strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the context of Stellar Cyber. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Stellar Cyber.

Aimei Wei: I’m the Founder and CTO of Stellar Cyber. I’ve been an engineer for the past 20 to 30 years. I’m always passionate about startups and problem-solving. As a mom, I have to balance my career and family. After my kids went to college, I felt it was time to dedicate all my energy to another baby.

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of companies did you work at before starting Stellar Cyber?

Aimei Wei: I worked for big and smaller company startups. I worked for Cisco and a few startups in the VoIP area.

Sramana Mitra: How long back did you start Stellar Cyber?

Aimei Wei: I started in early 2015, but, at that time, it was me doing research and participating in conferences to look for direction. At the end of 2016, we got seed-funded after people saw our demo. We started full-time in 2017.

Sramana Mitra: What is the concept of Stellar Cyber?

Aimei Wei: At a very high level, the problem we see is the cyber security crisis. Why do I call it a crisis? Because the digital transformations in IT have changed. On one hand, it opens the door to a whole new set of security issues. On the other hand, we have pointed out isolated tools that require a lot of people to operate. It’s very slow to eventually correlate and figure out what the problem really is.

The industry cannot keep up. We don’t have so many security tenants to fill this role using the existing tools. We needed a totally new solution. The solution we envisioned should be able to cover the whole attack surface. It should build a lot of automation to automatically detect and allow people to instantaneously stop the attack.

Sramana Mitra: Would you bucket yourself in the network security area, application security, and data security?

Aimei Wei: When we built this, we didn’t know what to call it. We called it a breach detection system. We called it a security analytics platform. Later on, industries started to define something called XDR. It was intended to be an extended detection response. We fit that bucket very well. It’s more a platform that has built-in capabilities that will cover your whole attack surface.

Sramana Mitra: It’s network, data, application and you’re doing analytics on all of it.

Aimei Wei: Right and we correlate them to form a holistic picture. We call it connecting the dots or seeing the forest rather than the trees.

Sramana Mitra: Who did you start with from an adoption point of view? What kind of customers did you start with and how did you get into those customers?

Aimei Wei: When we started, we had two types of customers. One is enterprises and the other is MSSP. Our sweet spot is with small to medium-sized organizations that have lean security teams. These are companies that don’t have an army of security analysts to operate various types of tools and don’t have the capability to purchase and operate each one of them.

Our solution fits that perfectly well because we package all the tools into one platform. They only needed to buy one license and we automate a lot of things. They don’t need too many people to operate it. Our very first customer is an MSSP. They also just started. When they started, they use other platforms to service their customers. Then they gradually moved to our platform. They grow with us.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei
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