Akhil Sharma
Founder
Akhil Sharma, founder of Armur AI, believes that the future of security cannot remain reactive. In his words, “The real cost of a breach isn’t just downtime, it’s strategic damage. We need proactive defense mechanisms that can simulate attacks and fix software weaknesses long before an adversary gets there”. In a world moving at software speed, waiting for an incident before patching systems is not just inefficient, it’s dangerous.
Red Teaming at Machine Speed
Armur AI is pioneering the shift toward proactive security by developing autonomous AI agents for high-impact cybersecurity use cases. Its flagship product, PentestGPT, is a next-generation Red Team-as-a-Service platform. These agents are trained to simulate real-world attackers across well-defined, customizable attack paths, effectively acting like ethical hackers embedded into the software lifecycle. The key innovation is that these agents learn and adapt in real time. While traditional pentest scripts follow fixed steps, PentestGPT is powered by a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) that dynamically responds to its environment and can discover new attack vectors during execution.
Deployment is handled carefully through a consultative model. Pentest GPT is not offered as a public SaaS platform due to its sensitive capabilities. Instead, it is installed within the client’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by Armur AI's team, following a full security assessment. The deployment includes Armur AI's proprietary software stack, which runs on industry-standard penetration testing distributions such as Kali Linux or BlackArch, ensuring safe, compliant, and professional use. Clients do not directly customize the tool. Instead, attack paths are pre configured by the company and tailored to each system, maintaining strict legal and ethical integrity.
A Productized Service for High-Stakes Security
Armur AI addresses diverse client needs through a productized service model rather than offering PentestGPT as a standalone product. This ensures that every deployment is tightly aligned with the client’s infrastructure, risk posture, and compliance requirements, while maintaining strict control over how the technology is used.
Priced at $40,000, the offering combines automated AI driven testing with manual penetration testing by expert ethical hackers. This hybrid model ensures both accurate detection of vulnerabilities and human validation of edge cases, providing deeper insights and actionable remediation guidance.
This makes it particularly valuable not just for enterprise security teams, but also for government agencies, defense organizations, and intelligence operations. Traditional penetration testing involves lengthy human cycles, manual reporting, and limited scalability. The company’s model replaces that with scalable, continuously adaptive AI agents, unlocking a major efficiency and intelligence boost.
From the Battlefield to the Codebase
Armur AI's vision is to become a leading defense contractor for AI-driven cybersecurity. To achieve this, the company is initiating conversations with global intelligence agencies such as RAW (India), CIA and NSA (USA), and Mossad (Israel), organizations that demand the highest levels of cyber protection. Given the sensitivity of its offering, the company operates with a
tightly curated client base and emphasizes ethical use, national security vetting, and compliance alignment at every stage.
Armur AI is already backed by some of the most prominent names in technology acceleration and innovation. The company is supported by Techstars, Outlier Ventures, Google’s AI Startup Program, NVIDIA Inception, and has received dilution-free grants from Aptos and Tezos. It is currently valued at USD 14 million, and is designed to serve engineering-first companies similar to Gitlab, Hashicorp, Atlassian, Confluent, Supabase and Vercel, fast-moving teams that value developer-first security tools and scalable workflows.
“We also operate at a critical juncture in the compliance journey. Organizations often engage with us to perform penetration testing, a requirement for major regulatory certifications including HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR. By identifying vulnerabilities ahead of the audit process, we help enterprises strengthen their security posture and ensure readiness for compliance frameworks. With this, we play a foundational role in enabling companies to meet regulatory standards while keeping pace with software and product velocity”, highlights Akhil.
Code Security for the AI-Coding Era
In addition to its high-security pentesting platform, the company has also launched a developer-facing product that’s freely accessible on its website, no credit card or installation required. This tool is designed to address a rapidly growing blind spot in modern software development, which is AI-generated code.
In the current wave of ‘vibe-coding’, developers use LLMs like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to generate hundreds or thousands of lines of code from just a few prompts. However, this code is frequently pushed to production without adequate review. Worse, the models generating this code have been trained on open-source repositories riddled with security vulnerabilities, meaning developers are often unknowingly copying insecure patterns.
Armur AI's AI code scanning tool is purpose-built for this challenge. It uses large context windows and reasoning driven vulnerability detection to analyze AI-generated code at scale. These agents go beyond static signature matching.They interpret logic, detect subtle misconfigurations, and offer human-level remediation guidance, making them especially useful for fast-moving engineering teams that prioritize speed but don’t want to compromise on security.
Unlike PentestGPT, which is available only through enterprise engage-ments, this code security product is completely self-serve and free to use. Developers can sign up on the Armur AI platform and begin scanning their codebases instantly, no credit card, no sales call, just frictionless access to powerful vulnerability detection.
Akhil Sharma: At the Crossroads of Tech and National Security
Before founding Armur AI, Akhil Sharma led a technology consultancy for 7 years, working with Fortune 500 clients. He is also a respected technical educator, author of Rust for Blockchain Application Development (Packt Publishing), creator of three top-rated LinkedIn Learning courses, and a mentor to over 200,000 engineers globally. His YouTube channel on AI, security, and system design has garnered 2.6 million+ views, and his content is widely used by engineers across top product companies.
This rare mix of deep technical insight, communication clarity, and product-building experience has helped the company gain traction with both CISOs and engineering teams, a group often hard to align. But perhaps the strongest driver behind the company is Akhil’s personal connection to national security. Having grown up with his father, a senior officer in the Indian Army and later an official with the Ministry of Defence, Akhil was exposed early to the critical importance of cyber infrastructure, defense intelligence, and national resilience.
The Cyber Warfare Shift
As AI continues to transform both offensive and defensive capabilities in the digital domain, cyber warfare is quickly becoming the most critical frontier in global geopolitics. Adversaries are already deploying autonomous AI powered malware, capable of evading detection, adapting to dynamic environments, and launching coordinated multi-vector attacks without human oversight. This marks a fundamental shift, where traditional, reactive security postures are no longer enough. Armur AI is built to prepare intelligence agencies and governments for this new era of machine-speed cyber conflict. By simulating advanced persistent threats using its AI red team agents, the company enables clients to identify systemic vulnerabilities, stress test national infrastructure, and build cyber resilience proactively.
“We’re no longer preparing for if a breach happens, we’re preparing for when autonomous threats try to outthink our systems. The only way to stay ahead is to simulate these threats before adversaries deploy them”, highlights Akhil.
As global tensions rise and cyber becomes the first point of contact in modern warfare, the company offers governments the critical ability to train, test, and fortify their digital defenses, before real-world consequences unfold. Akhil puts it simply, “You can’t patch fast enough anymore. The only way to stay ahead is to think like an attacker, and now, with AI, we can think like a million attackers at once”.
Armur AI is already backed by some of the most prominent names in technology acceleration and innovation. The company is supported by Techstars, Outlier Ventures, Google’s AI Startup Program, NVIDIA Inception, and has received dilution-free grants from Aptos and Tezos. It is currently valued at USD 14 million, and is designed to serve engineering-first companies similar to Gitlab, Hashicorp, Atlassian, Confluent, Supabase and Vercel, fast-moving teams that value developer-first security tools and scalable workflows.
With its AI-native architecture, defense-grade protocols, and deep commitment to ethical cybersecurity, Armur AI isn’t just building security tools, it’s engineering the future of cyber defense
“We also operate at a critical juncture in the compliance journey. Organizations often engage with us to perform penetration testing, a requirement for major regulatory certifications including HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR. By identifying vulnerabilities ahead of the audit process, we help enterprises strengthen their security posture and ensure readiness for compliance frameworks. With this, we play a foundational role in enabling companies to meet regulatory standards while keeping pace with software and product velocity”, highlights Akhil.
Code Security for the AI-Coding Era
In addition to its high-security pentesting platform, the company has also launched a developer-facing product that’s freely accessible on its website, no credit card or installation required. This tool is designed to address a rapidly growing blind spot in modern software development, which is AI-generated code.
In the current wave of ‘vibe-coding’, developers use LLMs like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to generate hundreds or thousands of lines of code from just a few prompts. However, this code is frequently pushed to production without adequate review. Worse, the models generating this code have been trained on open-source repositories riddled with security vulnerabilities, meaning developers are often unknowingly copying insecure patterns.
Armur AI's AI code scanning tool is purpose-built for this challenge. It uses large context windows and reasoning driven vulnerability detection to analyze AI-generated code at scale. These agents go beyond static signature matching.They interpret logic, detect subtle misconfigurations, and offer human-level remediation guidance, making them especially useful for fast-moving engineering teams that prioritize speed but don’t want to compromise on security.
Unlike PentestGPT, which is available only through enterprise engage-ments, this code security product is completely self-serve and free to use. Developers can sign up on the Armur AI platform and begin scanning their codebases instantly, no credit card, no sales call, just frictionless access to powerful vulnerability detection.
Akhil Sharma: At the Crossroads of Tech and National Security
Before founding Armur AI, Akhil Sharma led a technology consultancy for 7 years, working with Fortune 500 clients. He is also a respected technical educator, author of Rust for Blockchain Application Development (Packt Publishing), creator of three top-rated LinkedIn Learning courses, and a mentor to over 200,000 engineers globally. His YouTube channel on AI, security, and system design has garnered 2.6 million+ views, and his content is widely used by engineers across top product companies.
This rare mix of deep technical insight, communication clarity, and product-building experience has helped the company gain traction with both CISOs and engineering teams, a group often hard to align. But perhaps the strongest driver behind the company is Akhil’s personal connection to national security. Having grown up with his father, a senior officer in the Indian Army and later an official with the Ministry of Defence, Akhil was exposed early to the critical importance of cyber infrastructure, defense intelligence, and national resilience.
The Cyber Warfare Shift
As AI continues to transform both offensive and defensive capabilities in the digital domain, cyber warfare is quickly becoming the most critical frontier in global geopolitics. Adversaries are already deploying autonomous AI powered malware, capable of evading detection, adapting to dynamic environments, and launching coordinated multi-vector attacks without human oversight. This marks a fundamental shift, where traditional, reactive security postures are no longer enough. Armur AI is built to prepare intelligence agencies and governments for this new era of machine-speed cyber conflict. By simulating advanced persistent threats using its AI red team agents, the company enables clients to identify systemic vulnerabilities, stress test national infrastructure, and build cyber resilience proactively.
“We’re no longer preparing for if a breach happens, we’re preparing for when autonomous threats try to outthink our systems. The only way to stay ahead is to simulate these threats before adversaries deploy them”, highlights Akhil.
As global tensions rise and cyber becomes the first point of contact in modern warfare, the company offers governments the critical ability to train, test, and fortify their digital defenses, before real-world consequences unfold. Akhil puts it simply, “You can’t patch fast enough anymore. The only way to stay ahead is to think like an attacker, and now, with AI, we can think like a million attackers at once”.
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