Seth Blank

Seth Blank is co-founder and CEO of Backplanes, which gives security teams visibility and control over what their AI agents do. He leads the company and its work with security teams, and founded it with Neil Kumaran and Nick Vlku.

Before Backplanes he spent seven years at Valimail, the email authentication company, joining in 2017 to run its open source and standards work and rising to Chief Product Officer and then Chief Technology Officer. On his watch Valimail grew to 100,000 customers and was acquired by DigiCert. When Google and Yahoo made email authentication a requirement for bulk senders in 2024, he was the industry voice Forbes turned to for what it meant.

He has built for security leaders before. At M3AAWG, the consortium of more than 200 companies where Google, Microsoft, Comcast, and AT&T work on messaging abuse together, he co-chaired the Technical and Collaboration Committees and now serves as co-vice chair of the board.

His standards record runs deeper still. He co-chaired the IETF DMARC working group from March 2020 to March 2026, the years in which DMARC was revised toward a proposed standard. He is an editor of RFC 8617, the Authenticated Received Chain protocol that lets forwarded mail keep its authentication. He chaired the AuthIndicators Working Group, which created BIMI, from 2018, and is first author of the BIMI specification at the IETF.

He and Nick Vlku have built together since high school. Their social search startup YourTrove was acquired by Live Nation Labs in 2014. He holds a degree in mathematics, computer science, and physics from the University of Michigan.