From Ethical Hacker to Serial Founder | Francisco Nina Rente | Cyber Security District Podcast

Your organisation has 143 security tools and still doesn’t know what to fix first. Sound familiar? In this episode, host Jeroen Prinse sits down with Anuj Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Gambit Cyber. Anuj spent over 12 years in threat intelligence at iSight, FireEye, Mandiant, and Intel 471, and kept running into the same problem: the intelligence was good, but nobody could operationalize it. That gap is what Gambit Cyber was built to close. They dig into Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), why it’s a program and not a tool, what AI-native really means in security and the uncomfortable question of who is accountable when an autonomous system gets it wrong. In this episode:

The Rise of Identity-Based Attacks with Olivier Eyries | Saporo What if you could see your entire attack surface the way a hacker does and fix it before they strike? In this episode, hosts Laurens Jagt sit down with Olivier Eyries, co-founder and CEO of Saporo, one of Switzerland's fastest-growing cybersecurity startups. Saporo helps organisations stop hackers by identifying and eliminating identity risks before attackers can exploit them. Olivier is a serial entrepreneur with two previous ventures under his belt, including one sold to Proofpoint in 2021. He and his co-founders built what he calls a "Google Maps for cybersecurity": a graph-based platform that maps every attack path, every permission, and every identity risk across an organisation's environment. In this conversation, he breaks down why identity-based attacks have exploded, what AI agents mean for the attack surface, and why fixing one permission can block millions of potential attack paths. In this episode:

What if your infrastructure was built secure from minute one and stayed that way? In this special one year anniversary episode of Cyber Security District, host Jeroen Prinse sits back down with Mahdi Abdulrazak (CEO) and Kim van Lavieren (CTO) of Dawnguard, a security automation platform that turns approved security architecture directly into deployable cloud infrastructure as code. One year in, having just closed a pre-seed round and raised €6.3 million in total funding and opening a new office in New York, Dawnguard is making a bold bet: that the only real answer to modern cyber threats isn't better detection or faster patching, it's building systems that are resilient by design from the very start. Mahdi and Kim have both led security teams inside large organisations and lived through the same recurring nightmare: architecture locked in too early, security reviews arriving too late and a list of 50 findings that nobody has time to fix before the product ships. Dawnguard was built to break that cycle, with a collaborative canvas that lets teams design, validate and deploy secure infrastructure in minutes, with continuous drift detection to make sure it stays that way. One year on, we look back at how far that idea has come and what's next as the company expands. Key Takeaways:

What if you could clone your best cybersecurity consultant and put them to work on five engagements at once? In this episode of Cyber Security District, we sit down with Leslie Clement and Erie Berhitu, co-founders of Clember AI, an EU-first, AI-native platform built to automate the repetitive, time-consuming work that holds cybersecurity consultants back. Both Leslie and Erie spent years grinding through the same manual loops at major consultancy firms document analysis, gap assessments, risk reports, roadmaps before deciding enough was enough. Rather than build another consulting firm or hire more headcount, they built a platform. Clember AI now enables security consultants to run five or more client engagements simultaneously, with consistent, high-quality output every time. And they did it entirely bootstrapped, no VC, no investor pressure, just product-market fit and a clear-eyed vision of where cybersecurity consulting is heading. In this episode, we explore:

In this episode of Cyber Security District, we speak with Tom Leijte, founder of Passguard, one of the most exciting emerging cybersecurity companies in the Netherlands. Passguard helps organizations detect when infected devices, stolen credentials, and active sessions show up on criminal marketplaces, giving security teams early visibility before exposure turns into a breach. Tom shares how his journey started outside of “traditional” cybersecurity, working in private investigations where dark web intelligence was already part of high-stakes screening work. Together with his technical co-founder, he built the capabilities to infiltrate closed criminal forums and surface the kind of forensic-level logs most companies never see until it’s too late. In this episode, we cover: