Osto was invited to present at the AI Innovators Forum, hosted at the SVB Experience Centre in Silicon Valley. The Forum was organised by Founders Creative and the Founder Social Club. The format was deliberately selective: 50-60 senior attendees including investors, operators, and founders, with no press and no public livestream. The kind of room where conversations get more substantive because participants can speak candidly.
The evening included a fireside between Mala Ramakrishnan and Ravi Shankar, alongside a curated pitch session featuring Osto and a small group of other founders.
Founders walked up after Karmesh’s pitch and said, in different forms, the same thing: “This is exactly what we have been looking for.” When founders line up after the pitch with their actual security gaps and the specific problems they are dealing with, you are solving something real.
A few takeaways from the evening
Karmesh pitched Osto’s positioning: one cybersecurity platform for founders, with every module built in house, covering security and compliance as a single system. The response that came back was the most useful part of the evening. Multiple founders followed up immediately, with specific security gaps and concrete problems they were trying to solve. That kind of response after a five-minute pitch is the highest signal an early-stage company gets in a room like this.
The conversations after the pitch reinforced something we have been seeing across the Bay Area. Fast-scaling teams are struggling with security in a way that is qualitatively different from previous generations of SaaS. AI-native companies, agentic workloads, multi-cloud deployments, and rapid hiring create an attack surface that traditional point-tool security cannot keep up with. The line of founders after the pitch was almost entirely from companies in exactly that shape.
Closed-door events compound credibility in a way public conferences do not. Fifty senior people in your space watching you pitch, with several walking up afterward and several more following up the same week, sends a stronger word-of-mouth signal through the rest of the network than most public events can match.
Thanks to Vida Vidyangi Patil for the introduction, and to Vijay Ratthinam, Mala Ramakrishnan, and Colton Kaplan for bringing together such a thoughtful group of people. And to SVB for hosting the evening.
If your team is scaling faster than your security is, we’d be useful to talk to.
Solving security for fast-scaling teams is exactly what Osto is built for.
One cybersecurity platform for founders, with every module built in house, covering security and compliance as a single system. If the conversation founders had with us after the pitch sounds like something your team needs, we’d love to hear from you.