The Story of Cranium: Building the Future of AI Security
Most startup stories follow a predictable path: founder spots opportunity, leaves corporate job, builds company. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Cranium CEO Jonathan Dambrot shares a journey that took the opposite route – and ultimately led to creating a company at the intersection of AI and security.
From Founder to Partner and Back Again
Before Cranium, Jonathan had already built and sold a successful company. As the founder of Prevalent, he created a leader in third-party risk management and threat intelligence, eventually selling it to a private equity firm. But his next move surprised many: he joined KPMG as a partner.
“I got a lot of that when I first started there,” Jonathan recalls. “‘What do you mean you’re going to KPMG?'” But this unconventional move provided crucial insights that would later shape Cranium. At KPMG, he discovered an “extraordinarily entrepreneurial environment” with unprecedented access to enterprise-scale problems.
The Genesis of Cranium
While running KPMG’s third-party security business globally, Jonathan noticed a critical gap in the market. As organizations rapidly adopted AI and machine learning systems, security considerations were often an afterthought. “I couldn’t answer the question,” he notes. “I couldn’t get a positive answer to the question of how do you get visibility into the machine learning and AI systems.”
This observation led to Cranium’s incubation within KPMG. The company became the first technology business to spin out of KPMG studio in March 2023, emerging from stealth just a month later.
Building in a Climate of Fear
The timing proved fortuitous. “I’ve never seen more fear around any type of technology than AI,” Jonathan observes. This widespread anxiety about AI’s potential impacts created an urgent need for security and transparency solutions.
Cranium developed four key areas to address these challenges:
- Discovery and visibility into AI systems
- Protection against adversarial risks like data poisoning
- Automated compliance with emerging regulations
- Third-party AI risk management
A Community-First Approach
Rather than attempting to solve AI security challenges alone, Cranium has embraced a collaborative approach. The company works with organizations like ISAACS and the Global Resilience Federation, bringing together industry leaders to develop practitioner guides and standards.
“I don’t think any one person or one organization can solve” these problems, Jonathan explains. This community-first mindset has helped position Cranium as a trusted voice in the emerging AI security landscape.
Looking to the Future
The rapid pace of AI development means the future will belong to companies that can adapt quickly. “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,” Jonathan notes.
This acceleration creates both opportunities and challenges. Looking ahead, Jonathan predicts a stark divide between organizations that embrace AI thoughtfully and those that delay: “I think those that really understand it, they start building around it, they really take it and accept it today and start building it into everything that they’re doing are going to be in a much better position.”
For Cranium, the mission extends beyond just building security tools. It’s about enabling responsible AI adoption by providing the transparency and security frameworks necessary for organizations to move forward with confidence. 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.”
The story of Cranium illustrates that sometimes the best preparation for building a category-defining company comes from understanding the problem deeply from multiple angles – even if that means taking an unconventional path to get there.