Team
Ansgar Grunseid, Cofounder & CEO
Ansgar has built and sold three companies used by 200 million people. His most recent, Arc, was a peer-to-peer CDN in the browser with 100M monthly users, acquired by Protocol Labs. At Protocol Labs he built Saturn, a decentralized CDN on Filecoin that grew 10x faster than Cloudflare and 7x faster than Fastly. He also authored the most popular print debugging and URL libraries in Python.
Amean Asad, Cofounder & CTO
Amean has built two companies and pioneered computer vision pose detection on mobile. He was #1 on Egypt's International Math Olympiad team and built Canada's most popular COVID tracker, with 100k users. Before Confidential AI he was at Protocol Labs, where he built the engineering behind Saturn, the largest decentralized CDN ever deployed.
Patrick Woodhead, Head of Product
Patrick is Head of Product at Confidential AI. Previously he led a lab at Protocol Labs focused on decentralized data transfer protocols. He has founded two startups and began his career at IBM. Patrick holds a Masters in Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science from the University of Oxford, where he wrote his dissertation on zero-knowledge proofs in lattice-based cryptography.
Yolan Romailler, Head of Security
Yolan is Head of Security at Confidential AI, where he works on cryptography, secure coding, hardware attacks, hardening Trusted Execution Environments and steering their post-quantum transition. He has spoken at Black Hat USA, NorthSec, GopherCon, Real World Crypto and DEF CON on automation in cryptography, elliptic curve vulnerabilities, post-quantum cryptography, functional encryption and distributed randomness. He introduced the first practical fault attack against EdDSA and the first deployed timelock encryption system, and has worked extensively on threshold cryptography: VRFs, distributed key generation and decentralized access control. Previously he worked on Self-Sovereign Identity and Digital Currencies, helped secure Diem at Meta and Filecoin at Protocol Labs, and kickstarted Kudelski Security's cryptographic audit practice.
Aamir Rasheed, Member of Technical Staff
Aamir is a software engineer at Confidential AI. He founded and sold AgentBoard, which let anyone run AI agents without a terminal. Aamir holds a master's degree in computer science from Stanford.
João Sousa Andrade, Member of Technical Staff
João is a Member of Technical Staff at Confidential AI. Previously he was an engineer at Protocol Labs on the Saturn network.
Patrick McClurg, Member of Technical Staff
Patrick heads up Confidential Kubernetes at Confidential AI. A fullstack engineer by trade, he has founded multiple startups in security and finance, specializing in threshold cryptography, verifiable randomness and public key infrastructure. He is a core maintainer of drand, which serves over 3 billion verifiable randomness beacons a month across a globally distributed network, with zero downtime since 2018.