About Tika
A small team, working on a big gap.
We’re building data security for the AI era, the layer that stays with data after access is granted. We’re not saying much about the how just yet. We’re happy to say plenty about the who.
Founder
Second time naming a gap.
Balaji Parimi
Founder & CEO
Balaji founded CloudKnox Security around a question nobody had an answer for: of all the permissions your cloud identities hold, how many do they actually use? That question became a product, the product became a category, CIEM, and CloudKnox became part of Microsoft, where it lives on as Entra Permissions Management. Before that, he was an early engineering leader at CloudPhysics, working on virtualized infrastructure at scale.
Tika is the question he couldn’t put down after CloudKnox: access control answers who may open the data. Then what? He wrote about it here.
Advisors
If you’ve run a VM, managed a phone fleet, or trusted a filesystem, you’ve used their work.
Suresh Batchu
Co-founder & CTO, MobileIron
Suresh co-founded MobileIron, built its engineering organization, and took it public, pioneering how enterprises secure the devices in everyone’s pockets. He was also a board member at CloudKnox and advised the team through its acquisition by Microsoft. 35+ patents across security, mobility, and identity. He’s seen this movie before, we like having him in the room.
Erez Zadok
Professor of Computer Science, Stony Brook University
Erez directs the File Systems and Storage Lab at Stony Brook and has chaired the field’s flagship conferences, FAST and USENIX ATC. When your product lives where files live, it’s useful to have one of the world’s authorities on filesystems reviewing your homework.
Carl Waldspurger
Architect of VMware ESX memory management & DRS
Carl designed the memory management and CPU scheduling at the heart of VMware’s ESX hypervisor and architected its Distributed Resource Scheduler, systems that quietly run a large share of the world’s enterprise computing. Before that, DEC’s Systems Research Center, PhD from MIT. He keeps our systems thinking honest.
Notice a theme? Devices, filesystems, virtualization. The layers where data actually lives, and where we work.
Investors
Backed by people who only do this.
We’re well funded by two firms that know exactly what they invested in.
Syn Ventures
A venture firm that invests exclusively in cybersecurity, run by former Fortune 500 CISOs. They’ve sat on the buying side of the table, which makes them usefully hard to impress.
Dell Technologies Capital
The venture arm of Dell Technologies, with deep roots in enterprise infrastructure: storage, systems, and the plumbing the world’s data runs on.
Where we are
Sunnyvale, California.
We work together, in person, in an office. Whiteboards get used. Hard problems get argued about over lunch, not over calendar invites. If that sounds like your kind of place, keep reading.
Yes, an actual office. It turns out building foundational security systems goes faster when the systems people are in the same room.