Kartik Gupta
Kartik is the Co-Founder & CTO of StackGuard, a remediation-first security platform built to secure one of the most critical and least-governed attack surfaces in modern cloud environments: Non-Human Identities (NHIs) - service accounts, API keys, secrets, CI/CD bots, scripts, and AI agents. In today’s cloud-native and agent-driven systems, machine identities outnumber humans by ~80:1, yet remain largely invisible, over-privileged, and unmanaged. This growing blind spot has rapidly become a primary breach vector. StackGuard exists to eliminate it. At StackGuard, Kartik focuses on building security systems that don’t stop at detection. The platform continuously discovers NHIs across environments; contextualizes risk using threat modeling and attack-path analysis; and automates remediation through AI-driven workflows. By combining deep scanning, runtime signals, and closed-loop remediation, StackGuard reduces MTTR from months to hours and enables security teams to govern NHIs at scale - before breaches occur.
Expertise
- Security Product Engineering (0 → 1)
- Non-Human Identity (NHI) & Machine Identity Security
- Cloud & Infrastructure Security
- Offensive Security & Attack Path Research
- CNAPP & Cloud-Native Security Research
- AI-Assisted Automation & Remediation Systems
Work
- Driving StackGuard’s vision around securing AI agents and autonomous systems
- Working closely with early customers to map real-world breach scenarios to automated remediation
- Architecting and executing the product and technical roadmap
- Designing remediation-first workflows for NHI risk containment and elimination
- Building deep discovery algorithms across cloud, SaaS, CI/CD, and VCS ecosystems
- Researching cloud attack paths that chain identities, misconfigurations, and secrets
- Translating offensive security research into scalable, enterprise-ready solutions
- Leading platform strategy, core engineering, and applied security research
Experience
Before founding StackGuard, Kartik worked across offensive security, cloud security research, and CNAPP platforms, building and breaking cloud systems at scale. His background spans identifying real-world cloud attack paths, designing detection and remediation logic, and working hands-on with modern cloud-native stacks. This blend of attacker mindset and platform engineering shapes StackGuard’s core philosophy: security must run inline - not after the breach. Kartik has been recognized in Google’s Hall of Fame and Bugcrowd for identifying critical vulnerabilities across SaaS platforms, APIs, and applications. He is deeply involved in the cybersecurity community, contributing to research, open-source tooling, and industry discussions around the future of cloud, identity, and AI security.
Education
Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore
B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering · Information Security
