Inside Cranium’s Category Creation Strategy: Building the AI Security Market Through Community

Creating a new market category is challenging enough. Creating one in AI security, where fear and uncertainty run high, requires an entirely different approach. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Cranium CEO Jonathan Dambrot reveals how they’re building the AI security category through community rather than competition.

Starting with Market Understanding

Two years ago, when Cranium began exploring AI security, the market wasn’t ready. As Jonathan notes, “People want to talk to me about this today. Whereas two years ago, when we started this process, not so much.” This timing gap between identifying a need and market readiness shaped their category creation strategy.

Building Through Collaboration

Rather than positioning themselves as the sole authority, Cranium took a collaborative approach to category building. “We have been working really hard to make sure from a category perspective, we have good consensus,” Jonathan explains. This led to partnerships with organizations like ISAACS and the Global Resilience Federation, bringing together industry leaders including Microsoft, Mitre, and CISA.

Creating Practitioner Resources

Over the past seven months, Cranium has focused on developing comprehensive practitioner guides. This collaborative effort involved about 20 organizations, addressing fundamental questions like “How are you thinking about this? What does the AI governance look like? How do you think about the components as a practitioner?”

Addressing Market Fear

The prevalence of fear in the AI market presented both a challenge and an opportunity. “I’ve never seen more fear around any type of technology than AI,” Jonathan observes. Rather than downplaying these concerns, Cranium made them central to their category narrative, focusing on transparency and security as enablers of responsible AI adoption.

Engaging with Regulators

Understanding that regulation would play a crucial role in category adoption, Cranium actively engaged with government stakeholders. “We have had a number of different discussions with different members within the government, whether that be statewide or federal,” Jonathan shares. This proactive approach helped shape regulatory discussions while building credibility with enterprise customers.

Building for Market Evolution

The rapid pace of AI development required a flexible approach to category building. Jonathan illustrates this dramatic shift: “We moved from basically a linear innovation environment where AI had penetration rates of about 20% to, like, an exponential AI penetration rate of 80% to 90% in a six month period.”

Creating Community Leadership

Rather than viewing other AI security companies as competitors, Cranium sees them as community members. Jonathan mentions working with founders like “Tito over at hidden layer” and others in the ecosystem, noting, “We think about how do we build a community to go solve these big problems that I don’t think any one person or one organization can solve.”

The key insight from Cranium’s approach is that category creation in emerging technology markets requires community building rather than traditional competitive positioning. As Jonathan puts it, “In most cases, if you build AI and ML systems appropriately and you do it the right way and it’s for good, and you’re solving big problems, we can do things that we could never have imagined in the past.”

For founders working to create new market categories, Cranium’s community-first approach offers valuable lessons: engage stakeholders early, build consensus through collaboration, and focus on solving industry-wide challenges rather than just building a better product.

The future of this approach looks promising. As AI continues its rapid evolution, the need for security and transparency will only grow. By building the category through community rather than competition, Cranium is creating a foundation for long-term market leadership while helping ensure the responsible development of AI technology.