About Backplanes
You can’t secure what you can’t see.
AI agents now write and run code across the business faster than anyone can watch. Backplanes gives teams a way to see what their agents are doing, and stop what they shouldn’t.
The founders
Three builders who saw it first
Co-founder & CEO
Seth Blank
Seth was CTO at Valimail, where he helped turn DMARC, the standard that protects the world’s email from spoofing and phishing, into something the whole industry now runs on. If you’ve ever seen a verified-sender checkmark in Gmail or Apple Mail, that’s the kind of standard he helped put in place. He leads Backplanes and its work with security teams.
Co-founder & CPO
Neil Kumaran
Neil spent years inside Google’s thorniest applied-ML problems, building the fraud, anti-abuse, and reputation systems that protect Google Cloud and Gmail at internet scale, eventually owning much of the trust, security, and infrastructure behind Gmail. He leads product, turning a hard-won instinct for large-scale abuse into how teams see and steer their agents.
Co-founder & CTO
Nick Vlku
Nick and Seth have been building together since high school, including a company they sold to Live Nation. He went on to lead engineering behind Twilio’s early growth and developer platform, and later Algolia’s, learning how infrastructure earns developers’ trust at scale. When one of Twilio’s businesses faced an existential regulatory threat in Europe, he was handpicked to fix it, and did. He leads engineering and go-to-market.
Why we started
We’ve spent our careers on the security and trust systems behind email, the cloud, and the developer platforms billions of people rely on. The same lesson held every time: you can’t secure what you can’t see, and the way you win is to give people visibility as a gift rather than a gate.
Agents are the newest and fastest actor inside the enterprise, and they showed up with almost no oversight. We started Backplanes to change that.
What we believe
How we work
Visibility before control
You can't govern what you can't see. We show teams the truth first.
Security that unlocks, not constrains
The point of an agent is what it can do. We make that safe instead of small.
Ship, then sharpen
At the speed of AI, delivering and iterating beats debating.
Earn trust in the details
Security people can't unsee a mistake. Neither can we.