How Geordie AI Shocked RSAC to Win Innovation Sandbox

Hey everyone. We're back here live on our day three coverage of RSA C on Broadcast Alley. I want to introduce you to this gentleman.

He's quite the star here this year at RSA. His name's Henry Comfort, and Henry is the CEO of Jordy. You never heard of Jordy?

Let me tell you about Jordy. Jordy was this year's winner of the Innovation Sandbox contest, which is probably the most prestigious startup contest in security, in cyber. Yeah.

The roster of past winners and past finalists even, have accounted for about $50 billion, more than $50 billion, in exits and- Yeah ... and liquidity events as we saw. Henry, first of all, congratulations- Thank you very much ...

to you and the whole Jordy team. Yeah. Because it's not just a one person.

It's definitely not. There's nearly 25 of us now. So, yeah, it's a team effort to get here.

And I always say I've got the easy job, right? I rock up, and I tell people about it and everything along those lines. And then we have an amazing team of engineers and Benji, my co-founder, Hannah, my other co-founder, who have done so much to get the product where it is.

So I get to have that moment on stage and claim a little bit of credit, but they're the clever ones. Absolutely. Well, every good leader always says that, but we'll get into it.

But Henry, before there was a Jordy, there was a Henry Comfort. Yes. Give us a little bit of your journey.

I'd love to hear it. Yeah. My journey, I would say is pretty non-traditional for someone in cyber.

So, hey, we can weave a little bit here. I was a COO of a professional football club in the UK. Really?

I built a model that helped football clubs recruit managers. It was like "Moneyball," but for football managers. And then I helped a club with it, and the CEO just one day, I was super young, 22, I think I was at the time.

" But he did take it, and I did that for a few years. And I was in Cambridge. That was where the football club is in the UK.

Mm-hmm. And I got to know, really well, the team at Darktrace. Okay.

Who have been a big- Sure ... success story in cyber and certainly in European tech. " No.

He wasn't empowering me as much. But eventually, I rose up. I led global operations at Darktrace.

Did a lot as we scaled the business. Had a lot of fun. And- Who was the CEO there?

Was that- Poppy. Poppy Gustafsson. Right.

Okay. Poppy's fantastic, and had a lot of wonderful years working there and getting to know cyber, getting to know people in the industry, and really went from there and just love building. Love building and building in a space that's just incredibly impactful, right?

The impact of cyber attacks and disruption is massive for society. Anyone watching this or anyone at a conference can recount stories of real life things, and I remember it during the COVID crisis in the UK, there were a bunch of hospitals getting hacked. My wife worked in one of them.

And the impact that had on cardiac arrest outcomes was massive. Mm-hmm. All from ransomware, right?

And things of that nature. And I just saw the impact that cyber disruption had in society and just grew in love with the space. And now we're building at Jordy.

We're having a lot of fun helping people really get to grips with agents, the risk they bring, but also to unlock the benefits, right? And that's where we now are. Love it.

I love it. So I've started four or five companies myself, venture backed. Yeah.

Amazing. Not this. This wasn't venture backed.

Yeah. But this was an accident. Yeah, an accident.

A good one. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I started writing and speaking after I left my last venture backed security company. Yeah. And it grew into this.

Yeah. But I know it's one thing, you could be the COO, it's another thing, someone else asks you to run their business. Yeah.

To found a company- Yeah ... and as a CEO- Yeah ... it's not something one does lightly.

Right? Of course not. The commitment, there has to be a passion.

Yeah. " Yeah. " Yeah.

Some way it's not a little, some way it's really a big way better. Yeah. But we're doing something.

With Jordy, what was that passion? Because- Yeah ... you didn't foresee AI five years ago, seven years ago, right?

Yeah. What was kind of that moment- Yeah ... where you just fell in love?

Yeah. Because as an entrepreneur, we fall in love. They're like our children, right?

Yeah. When was that moment? So I think there's two sides to this question, though, right?

So there's the problem that you're going to solve, and also how you go about it day to day. I'm very passionate about the team that we build. And for me, starting a company, when you say taking it lightly, you've got this opportunity, which I take very seriously, to have a significant impact on our team's lives.

Absolutely. They come to work, they can either go and work somewhere where they don't feel empowered, they don't love going to work, or they can come hopefully to us, whereby they go, "This is amazing. I feel like I'm growing.

I feel like I'm learning. " And I sincerely mean that. That's why my biggest motivation is that, is for the people in the team.

Putting that aside with the tech, thoughI actually, I'm going to counter something you said. Go ahead. We saw the impact, say, at Darktrace of autonomous AI a long time before maybe you saw it in other spaces because Darktrace as a piece of technology was autonomously responding to cyber threats or whatever.

When you started to think about the impact that AI could have in taking autonomous action in the rest of society and operations, I got incredibly excited about the possibilities of that. I thought about parts of organizations that I had led in the past and where agents would've been incredibly helpful, both to the teams and to the business and whatnot. But it was when I started talking to early adopters and CISOs, security teams in those organizations, I could just see this is going to be a huge problem.

Let me tell you, at the time, most people thought I was nuts. They were like, "This is way too early. Is this going to be a thing?

Is this a hype cycle? " You know, that kind of thing. People were doubt- There are people walking around here- Yeah ...

who still think that, by the way. Yeah. And there are, right?

Now, I tell you what, they should ask our customers why that's not the case. Right. But anyway, what I'd say is, we saw, for early adopters, there's two pathways that they found themselves in.

I call them the hell no camp and the cart before the horse camp. The hell no camp said, "There's no way that we can operationalize agents in our organization. How are we going to know what they're doing?

What risks are they creating for the business? " Then you had the other camp, which they had brought agents into the business, and now they realized they couldn't see what they were doing, what risks they were creating, and they had no way of really dealing with it. " And then they'd do a board audit, cyber insurance review, and it would go the wrong way.

And we looked at the potential of the technology, which by the way, with coding agents in particular, you can't doubt the impact on the nature of work. Mm-hmm. And it's coming for lots of other spaces.

It's way beyond the hype now. So if you look at it as we did, we said there's going to be a middle path. There's going to be a way in which we can unlock this innovation for society, the benefits that come with businesses, and this is a transformational change for industry.

And we just felt, as a team, this was the best problem for us to try and play a role in solving in our lifetimes. If we were to put $100, $1,000, $1 million, this would be it. And then we started working with teams who were really trying to unlock the benefits of agents but manage the risk, and it's just been wonderful building alongside them, enabling them to enable innovation, but also do so securely.

And it's a fascinating problem to help teams solve right now. Absolutely. Agreed with you.

All right. So there's your passion. Yeah.

I've got a lot of it. There's the technological. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. You know what, I've been involved in venture-backed- Yeah ...

companies for about 30 years, in- Yeah ... back in the dot com days. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I learned, even back then, companies where the founders aren't passionate don't succeed.

Yeah. So you need that. Yeah.

But you got the passion, we got the technology, we got the problem- Yeah ... right, that we're looking to fix. All of that comes together to form Jordy.

Yeah. Jordy. How does that kind of manifest itself though?

Yeah. Like the go to market, getting the customers. Of course.

I'm not even talking about the Sandbox thing yet. Yeah. But you and thousands of other people- Yeah ...

are starting companies every day. How did that all come together? When did you see, in the VC world, they call it market fit.

Yeah. But when did you see, hey, people need this. Yeah.

It's not a nice to have. Yeah. It's a must-have.

They need this. Yeah. I mean, look, I've got loads of stories on this now.

So I think the first thing is people don't know what's out there in terms of their agentic footprint. Yeah. And with Jordy, you're able to understand that very quickly across your endpoint, where developers are leveraging coding agents, in your code bases, where they're building agents to help your business, and also in cloud-hosted services and SAS services where your business is leveraging agents that maybe they've bought or built in other people's platforms.

And that's really hard today to get an understanding of. Like really hard. So when customers all of a sudden go, "Hang on, across like two calls with you guys, I've been able to understand my agentic footprint and get visibility I couldn't out of any of my existing tooling.

I had no answer to this, and I've been able to do it super fast with you guys," those are moments where I've gone, we're adding value. They now understand risk. They can manage that risk as a result.

And then, I mean, there's so much more to the product. I mean, we deal with everything from posture-based risk, behavioral risk, governance. Our remediation engine is innovative.

I think it's one of the key reasons why we won Sandbox is we have not said, "Okay, we've got existing architecture. We've got an existing view of the world. " And agents need context, and you can influence them, kind of like humans in many ways.

And we leverage context engineering to ultimately mitigate risk. And when I've seen our customers see that in action, I'm so proud of what the team have built and the difference we make to customers because it's like a magic moment. Right.

" Like, there's no gateway. No gateway. There's no firewall.

This wasn't a binary switch that we just turned on. And I think for us, there have been multiple moments where people have gone, "You guys are building to actually solve our problem in the agentic era. " And it's been amazing and we continue to evolve weekly, daily, right, for our customers right now.

It's just been amazing working with them to help them secure and govern their agentic workforce as we go into this new era. Love it. Let's pivot a little bit.

Of course. That's another startup word. Let's pivot.

Yeah. Let's talk about what the Sandbox experience was like. Yeah.

Amazing, right? Literally a year ago, we were buying laptops to start the company. We were that early, right, a year ago.

I remember coming to RSA last year, we'd just signed a term sheet with General Catalyst and Ten Eleven, and you're coming here and no one knows your company, right? " Yeah. " And you're having those types of conversations.

" And you go: "Oh, are we going to go for Sandbox? " Yeah. It makes companies.

It crowns companies, right? Right. And then we applied for it late last year, and when we found out, oh my gosh.

Me and my co-founders- Amazing ... it was that elation. " Sign the embargo.

Oh, okay. And then when we told the team, the team were... Amazing.

" We already knew this in terms of the customer impact and the traction we were getting, but we're like: "We're part of something big here. " And so then you get on stage, and you get the opportunity to pitch in front of, I think it was 1,500-odd people. Yeah.

Some of the best security leaders have chosen your company as a finalist, and then have chosen you to win it. It's hard to think of other moments, away from winning and delighting customers every day, that signal validation more than that. So it's a very, very proud moment.

" And I think that was great, right? She has no idea what our technology does. No, of course.

Literally none. I've lived my whole life like this. Yeah, but it's a very proud moment.

Yeah. And it was like that for all of the Geordie team, right? And I'm so proud of the team because ultimately, this has come from their work, right?

It's easy for me getting up on stage and pitching to some degree, but they're the ones who put the effort in. They're the ones who stay up late on a customer call and listen, and by the next day, have delivered something to solve the problem. And it's just a great moment for us.

I love it. Couple of just last little things. Yeah.

Henry, website. Yeah. ai.

How do you spell Geordie? AI. And that's obviously the on-ramp.

Yeah. Once they get there, what should they do? There's a little button, it says Book a Demo.

Get on there. You might even be with me on the demo. I love demoing.

I'm there all the time. And just take a look at our tech and tell us how you're dealing with agents, right? " Yeah.

We're not here to waste people's time or to oversell on something we can't do. Right. We've got tech that works.

You can ask our customers. But we've got tech that works, and come and see it. See it for yourself.

And before you know it, you'll probably have a view of your agentic footprint on the next two calls. " And very quickly, you realize you can't get it from those things, or it's going to take you months to even get a picture. With us, couple of calls later, you understand your agentic footprint.

I love it. Congratulations. Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it. " We're going to take a break. We'll be back in a little bit.