IT Tech Pulse Exclusive Interview with Mike Armistead, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pulse Security AI

Mike Armistead, Co-Founder & CEO of Pulse Security AI, in an exclusive interview with IT Tech Pulse, discusses why CISOs need an operational system of record and how AI agents are transforming security leadership.

Mike, your career spans application security, SOC automation, and now executive security operations. Looking back at your journey from Fortify to Pulse Security AI, Inc., what consistent market gap have you always been most compelled to solve?

The same gap has pulled at me for twenty years: the distance between what’s true technically and what a leader can actually act on. At Fortify, the problem was that security lived downstream of where software got built, so we moved it upstream. At Respond, the SOC was drowning in signals with no machine intelligence to make sense of it. Now it’s the leadership layer. Security leaders are managing business-critical risk, but the operating picture they work from is still stitched together by hand. Every time I’ve started a company, it’s been the same instinct: close the gap between the technical reality and the decision someone has to make on top of it.

Fortify helped define application security before it became mainstream, while Respond Software brought AI into SOC workflows early. What have those category-creation experiences taught you about building security companies ahead of market timing?

That you can be completely right and still be early, and being early is expensive. Fortify was the start of application security before it became a product category. Respond put AI in the SOC before AI was accepted by the masses. The lesson isn’t to time the market perfectly, it’s to build for the pain that’s already acute and let the rest catch up. So, I’ve gotten allergic to selling the future. If a buyer has to imagine a world that doesn’t exist yet to see the value, you’re too early. The job is to solve what’s breaking for them right now, today, and elegantly – maybe differently – then they could have imagined.  That way, you earn the right to the bigger story later.

Following the acquisition of Respond Software by FireEye, what operational challenges inside enterprise security organizations stood out most – and ultimately shaped the founding thesis behind Pulse Security AI, Inc.?

What stood out after the acquisition was how much weight had landed on security leaders, and how little had been built to carry it. The risk they own is now business risk, board-level risk, but the way they run the function is still largely technical, fragmented across dozens of tools and a lot of manual translation. They’re expected to speak the language of the business while working with inputs that speak only the language of the technology. That disconnect is the founding thesis behind Pulse.

You’ve argued that CISOs still lack a true “system of record” despite managing increasingly business-critical risk. Why has security leadership remained operationally fragmented while other executive functions have evolved around centralized platforms?

I believe this largely has to do with the fact that an organization’s cybersecurity function’s “systems” grew entirely bottoms-up.  The first were network sniffers that required monitoring for attacks in network packets. Today, cybersecurity has vastly expanded to include systems to secure identities, endpoints and clouds…but still largely for the practitioners. This fragmentation with low-level data makes it hard to provide a consolidated view that provides a program-level perspective.  Other functions demanded it earlier in their maturation. We think that the CISO’s office owes it.

Pulse Security AI positions itself above the traditional security stack through a contextual intelligence layer. How does that fundamentally change the way CISOs prioritize decisions, communicate risk, and manage security operations day-to-day?

Now that the layer is real, it changes where a leader spends their attention. Instead of assembling the picture by hand, they work from one that’s already connected. The context graph sits above the tools the team already runs, EDR, cloud, identity, and the policy and program knowledge that usually lives in people’s heads, and it holds the relationships between them: the risk, the regulation attached to it, the business it touches, the person who owns it.

For prioritization, decisions are made based on business impact rather than alert volume. The leader can see which risks actually matter to the business and move on those first, rather than triaging whatever was loudest that morning.

On communicating risk, translation stops being a manual scramble the night before a board meeting. The business context is already attached to the technical reality, so a leader can speak to the board in the board’s own terms and stand behind it.

Day to day, the program-level work that eats the week, chasing status, reconciling tools, and keeping spreadsheets current, gets handled by agents running underneath the leader. What’s left is the part only a leader can do: judgment. Spend less time proving what’s true, more time deciding what to do about it.

Many security teams today are overwhelmed by tools, dashboards, alerts, and reporting requirements. How is Pulse Security AI helping CISOs shift from reactive security management toward more strategic operational leadership?

The overload is real, and I don’t want to be glib about it. Most leaders aren’t short on data; they’re starving for insight, and the answer to that has never been to provide one more dashboard to check. The management shift we believe must happen is from a pile of tools to actually leading a program: knowing where the risk is, what it means to the business, and what to do about it, without spending the week reverse-engineering it from raw output. When that work stops being manual, the leader gets to do the part only they can do: judgment.

Rather than competing in detection or response, Pulse Security is targeting the broader security leadership layer. What convinced you that the industry was finally ready for a platform specifically designed for the CISO office?

Accountability finally caught up. Boards and business executives are more aware of the dangers to operations, reputation and customer trust and they demand the risks to the business are mitigated properly.  This puts the CISO in front and center, especially in an era of rapid technical change like we are seeing due to AI. When the role changes that much, the tooling has to change with it, and right now there’s a real gap between what these leaders are responsible for and what’s been built to support them. That said, we didn’t decide the market was ready. The buyers did, and we listened.

Foundation Capital previously backed Respond Software and is now leading Pulse Security AI, Inc.’s seed round. What does that continued investor conviction say about both the market opportunity and the leadership team behind this company?

The conviction says two things. One, the market opportunity is real enough that someone who’s seen our work up close believes the timing is right. Two, they’re betting on the team as much as the thesis. Repeat founders get judged on whether they’ve learned anything, and that vote of confidence tells me they think we have.

During your stealth research phase, you spent significant time speaking directly with CISOs. Were there any insights or recurring frustrations that challenged your early assumptions and directly influenced the product direction?

We spent the stealth period in a room with many security leaders, and the most useful thing they did was to correct us. The recurring frustration wasn’t a missing feature; it was the gap between how confident a leader feels about their program and how confident their board feels about it. Those two pictures often don’t align, and closing that gap is more of an operational problem than a technology one. That reframed how we thought about what to build. We’ll back all of this with real data when we publish the research later this summer.

Enterprise security leadership is evolving rapidly alongside AI, governance, and board-level accountability. Over the next five years, how do you see the role of the CISO changing – and where does Pulse Security AI, Inc. fit into that transformation?

The role keeps climbing. AI is compressing the time between a decision, and its consequence, governance and board accountability are only getting heavier, and the CISO is moving from technical owner to genuine business leader, someone who mitigates cyber risk and helps the business take smart risks too. The leaders who win will be those who’ve built enough confidence in their systems to close their laptops and trust the operation. That’s a leadership and architecture problem, not a model problem. Pulse exists to give that leader the operating foundation to do it.

Thank you, Mike, for taking the time to share your insights with us.

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