The Story of Gombach: Building the Future of Cloud Security Remediation

Before Gombach became a reality, its origin story began with a frustration familiar to many CISOs. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Ian Amit shared how his experience managing security across multiple business units led to an insight that would shape the company’s mission.

From Pain Point to Innovation

At Sempra, Ian found himself running security for 15 different businesses through a centralized security group. “I’ve managed to build a really good understanding and visibility into all the 14-15 businesses, cloud deployment and everything that was wrong about them,” he recalls. “However, the biggest challenge that I faced was fixing things.”

This wasn’t just a technical challenge – it was a fundamental organizational problem. Security teams could identify issues but lacked the authority or capabilities to implement fixes. DevOps teams, who had the necessary access and skills, often had different priorities.

“We ended up sort of negotiating and horse trading with, all right, let’s prioritize this and beg for that, and ask DevOps to do this,” Ian explains. “I realized that the other side, DevOps or the CIO’s, the CTOs, those fixes weren’t really top of mind for them.”

The Mathematical Connection

Even the company’s name reflects its innovative approach. “Everyone asks that super geeky story about it,” Ian shares. “It is a Hungarian origin from a Hungarian mathematician that came up with a three-dimensional shape that is monomonostatic. It’s basically a self-writing object. And the origin story of Gombach is that we’re self-writing security.”

Building Deep Tech Takes Time

Unlike many startups that rush to market with minimal viable products, Gombach took a different approach. The company spent over a year developing its core technology before landing its first customer. “This is not your typical ‘oh, let’s build a security product that’s a single pane of glass,'” Ian emphasizes. “This is actual deep tech where we’ve had to build AI algorithms that did not exist before.”

This commitment to solving fundamental problems rather than creating surface-level solutions meant a longer development cycle, but it also resulted in a more robust and innovative product. The platform now provides contextual remediations at the code level, addressing configuration issues in cloud deployments with automated, intelligent solutions.

A Vision Beyond Security

Looking three to five years ahead, Ian sees Gombach’s impact extending far beyond security. “What we’re doing is essentially taking away a lot of the toil and the grunt work that engineers are doing when they’re building and maintaining their cloud environment,” he explains.

He draws an interesting parallel to the evolution of programming languages: “Anyone who programmed in assembly or classic C knows that they needed to manage memory by hand… While when you program in a modern language, you don’t need to think about memory management, the language takes care of that for you.”

This vision extends to cloud infrastructure management as a whole. “Three to five years, you’re not going to be needed to account for security needs when you’re building in cloud environment,” Ian predicts. “You’re not going to be inundated with having to make sure that certain performance characteristics or resilience characteristics are being met.”

Instead, developers will simply define policies – whether for security, performance, or resilience – and Gombach’s platform will handle the implementation details automatically. “That’s our grand vision that goes beyond security and free a lot of those again, grunt work, engineering DevOps work that’s being done right now and free them up to do higher level work.”

This ambitious vision positions Gombach not just as a security solution, but as a fundamental transformation in how organizations manage and secure their cloud infrastructure. By automating the complex, time-consuming tasks that currently burden both security and DevOps teams, they’re working to create a future where cloud infrastructure management is more efficient, secure, and accessible.