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. Under his product leadership Valimail passed 30,000 customers, and when Google and Yahoo made email authentication a requirement for bulk senders in 2024, he was one of the industry voices explaining why that mattered.

His standards record is the credential. 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. At M3AAWG, the industry body against messaging abuse, he co-chaired the Technical and Collaboration Committees and now serves as co-vice chair of the board.

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.