Founder profile

Neil Kumaran

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Backplanes

A decade leading the product teams that keep Gmail safe for billions of people. Now building the controls that let companies trust their AI agents.

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Neil Kumaran, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Backplanes

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Biography

The work behind the title

Neil Kumaran is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Backplanes, which gives security teams visibility and control over what their AI agents do. He founded it with Seth Blank and Nick Vlku after a decade at Google.

At Google he led Gmail Security & Trust: the product teams behind the spam, phishing, and malware defenses that stop more than 99.9 percent of what is sent at billions of inboxes. He announced Gmail’s move to TensorFlow filtering in 2019, co-authored Google’s guidance on pandemic-era phishing in 2020, and in 2023 announced the sender requirements that changed how bulk email is sent worldwide. A year later, unauthenticated mail to Gmail was down 65 percent.

He was vice-chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group behind the BIMI standard and brought BIMI to Gmail in 2021. His explanation of how Gmail’s filters work was entered into the federal court record in RNC v. Google, and his work is cited in the U.S. House hearing record and in legal scholarship.

In his own words

On the record

  • As we stand on the precipice of things like [generative] AI, maybe that changes even more.

    The Wall Street Journal, Feb 2025

  • At the time of account creation, we do evaluations. We try to figure out, “Does it look like this account is going to be used for malicious purposes?”

    Wired, Jun 2023

  • Many bulk senders don’t appropriately secure and configure their systems, allowing attackers to easily hide in their midst.

    The Verge, Oct 2023

Speaking topics

What Neil can speak to

  1. 01

    The newest actor in the enterprise is an AI agent. Who is watching it?

    An agent can be fully authorized and still do something nobody wanted. What a control layer for agents looks like.

  2. 02

    How Gmail changed the behavior of millions of senders in a year

    A plain rule, a public date, gradual enforcement. Unauthenticated mail fell 65 percent. The same playbook applies to agents.

  3. 03

    What generative AI does to phishing, seen from the inbox

    Gmail sees 15 billion unwanted messages a day. What changes when scams are perfect copies, and what still gives them away.

  4. 04

    Applied machine learning for abuse at internet scale

    Running models where 63 percent of what you block is new each day, and a false positive is someone’s paycheck.

  5. 05

    Authentication before classification

    Identity is the first question in any trust system. DMARC and BIMI, and why the same order applies to agents and tools.

  6. 06

    Security that unlocks rather than constrains

    Shipping controls that people accept. Visibility as a gift rather than a gate, for people and now for models.

The record

Press, bylines, talks, and citations

Press and interviews

Bylines

Talks

Standards

Cited in court, Congress, and scholarship

Press kit

For producers and editors

Name
Neil Kumaran
Title
Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Backplanes
Company
Backplanes
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/nkumaran
Bookings
hello@backplanes.com

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