Critical infrastructure is under attack. We built the defense.
The power grid, water systems, and public services your community depends on are being actively targeted by nation-state actors and ransomware groups. This is not a future threat. It is happening now. Spotlight exists because the current state of critical infrastructure protection is dangerously inadequate — and we built the fix.
The tools meant to protect us were never built for this fight.
Legacy systems built for a different era
Most critical infrastructure security tools were designed for IT and retrofitted — poorly — for OT. They alert. They don't fix. Every remediation requires an expensive professional services engagement, and your OT environment stays largely blind.
Cyber insurance premiums are skyrocketing
Premiums for critical infrastructure operators have surged. Insurers now demand evidence of active monitoring and documented remediation. Most organizations can't provide it.
One person defending critical systems
At many utilities and municipalities, a single IT generalist secures systems that protect entire communities — without the staffing, budget, or specialized tools to do it. Enterprise platforms were never priced for them. Spotlight is.
The gap between detection and remediation is where catastrophe lives.
When an attacker moves in minutes and a fix takes days, that window is where damage happens. Colonial Pipeline. Oldsmar water treatment. Rural electric cooperatives. These weren't failures of awareness — they were failures of capability. The market responded with tools that cost more, require more expertise, and still only detect.
Research-backed. Offensively informed. Built to defend.
Spotlight wasn't built by an AI startup that pivoted into cybersecurity. We were built from the ground up by a team with deep roots in national security research, offensive AI development, and applied machine learning — specifically to solve this problem.
Our work has been informed by the NSA, NIST, and the White House Office of the National Cyber Director. Our models are validated against containerised attack scenarios with scored checkpoints — a reproducible benchmark, so a change in what we detect can be measured rather than asserted.
The result is a platform that doesn't just report problems — it fixes them. On the device, with your approval. Without a mandatory deployment engagement, and without the days-long gap that turns incidents into catastrophes. Spotlight's core technology is patent pending.
NSA · NIST · White House ONCD
Our founding team has a track record of providing research and advisory work at the highest levels of US national cybersecurity — the same agencies defining the standards we build to.
Frontier AI Research
We have built LLM benchmarking and evaluation tools used by frontier AI labs and government AI-safety institutes. We don't integrate off-the-shelf models — we build purpose-specific ones.
MassChallenge · Deutsche Telekom T-Challenge
Spotlight has been selected for and participated in one of the most prestigious accelerators in the world for security solutions. The Spotlight team was also selected as one of 12 finalists (out of 500+ startups and university labs) to participate in Deutsche Telekom's and T-Mobile's annual T-Challenge in Bonn, Germany.
AI, cyber, and go-to-market, under one roof.
We've built LLM tools used by frontier AI labs, advised the agencies that set U.S. cybersecurity standards, and run security operations on classified defense networks. Now we're putting that experience to work for the operators who keep the lights on.
Katie Kuzin
CEO & Co-Founder
Former R&D lead at S&P Global, where she managed a $20M budget. Katie has built LLM tools used by Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Accenture, and leads Spotlight's product and AI direction.
LinkedIn
Alex Leader
COO & Co-Founder
Leads multimillion-dollar AI and cybersecurity projects, including a $2.1M Open Philanthropy grant. Alex has advised the NSA, NIST, and the White House Office of the National Cyber Director.
LinkedIn
Matt Farley
Head of Growth & Founding Partner
Sales and marketing leader with an Emmy-winning background in advertising and public campaigns. Matt heads growth at an award-winning advertising agency and serves on the board of the American Marketing Association's Oklahoma City chapter. At Spotlight, he leads sales and go-to-market.
LinkedInJarrod Powers
Founding Engineer
Security engineer with 10+ years in offensive security, secure network architecture, and applied cryptography across U.S. defense environments. Jarrod leads operations for encrypted classified-network infrastructure serving 700+ users worldwide and has deployed post-quantum cryptography on hardware security modules. An Army veteran, he builds security tooling in Rust, Python, and TypeScript, including a lightweight Rust agent for discovering and managing fleets of hosts.
Chinmay Shringi
Founding Engineer
Software engineer focused on AI agents, distributed systems, and secure virtualization. Chinmay has published research on GRAFT, a gRPC-routed framework for tasking AI agents on edge and personal devices, and worked on research at NYU into a secure virtual machine that limits exposure to operating-system vulnerabilities. He builds production AI systems on cloud-native infrastructure.
LinkedInBacked by a wider bench of specialists
Our founders and founding engineers work alongside cybersecurity specialists and additional engineers who support our assessments, agent development, and research. Every deployment has hands-on security expertise behind it, not just software.
Board & advisors
Years of combined experience in cyber operations, intelligence, and security leadership
Guided by veterans of cyber offense and defense.
Our board members and advisors have spent their careers on both sides of cybersecurity. Between them, they have stood up special operations cyber teams, built a global red team practice, led the response to one of the largest commercial cyber breaches, and guided federal agencies through FISMA and NIST security requirements. Collectively, they have served with or advised:
Three principles that shape everything we build.
Offense informs defense.
The best defenders think like attackers. Our detection and remediation logic is scored against containerised attack scenarios with rubric-graded checkpoints, not theoretical models. You can't patch what you haven't tried to break.
Detection without remediation is theater.
An alert that requires a 48-hour deployment engagement isn't protection — it's documentation of failure. Detection and remediation must be inseparable, automated, and instant.
Access is a matter of public safety.
Enterprise security has always been priced for enterprise budgets — leaving co-ops, water districts, and municipal IT teams to make do with inadequate tools. Protection from catastrophic cyberattack should not be a luxury. Spotlight was priced accordingly.
To protect the systems the world runs on —
and empower the people who share our vision.
IT-grade security, OT-grade manners.