We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

Enterprises rolled out AI agents and generative tools faster than they built any way to see what those systems were doing with sensitive data. Gidi Cohen built Bonfy to ask the question the existing security stack skips.Most security teams reach for DLP or CASB and ask who has access to the agent. Bonfy's framing — what the company calls Contextual Data Enforcement — asks something harder: what sensitive data is actually moving through AI agents, email, SaaS applications, collaboration tools and generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Bonfy's described customer base spans financial services, healthcare, insurance and technology, the sectors where unstructured content is hardest to govern.Gidi and host Jonathan W. Buckley talk about the intrinsic risks agentic AI brings into an organization and what it takes to get ahead of them, why AI doesn't carry the context a human brings to a judgment call, and the gap between a security problem that has a budget line and one that is merely a priority — the hardest part of selling a category buyers haven't funded yet.Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.comBonfy: https://bonfy.aiEnjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit The Artesian Network.

Software ships every week. Most penetration tests still run once a year. Rejah Rehim built Beagle Security to close that gap.Rejah started his career as a penetration tester, writing scripts to speed up his own audits. He saw small and mid-sized companies skipping pentests entirely because the cost was high and nobody was available to do them, so he turned those scripts into an automated product. Beagle Security launched with a lifetime deal that brought in roughly 1,600 to 1,700 early users, and that early usage trained the system. Today it has around 150 recurring subscription customers, and most still find it inbound through SEO and the blog.Rejah and host Jonathan W. Buckley talk about fitting security testing into the development cycle, why business-logic testing was the hardest part to automate, how the team handles misses and false positives in a trust-heavy sale, and what AI-written code means for the attack surface. His advice for security founders: get customer feedback as early as you can.Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.comConnect with Rejah Rehim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rejahrehimBeagle Security: https://beaglesecurity.comEnjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit The Artesian Network.

Ashok Rajan ran 75 demos in two months and closed nothing. Then he took every recording, fed it to AI, and rebuilt his company around what customers actually said.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan Buckley is joined by Ashok Rajan, founder of Pristine Data AI, an AI sales intelligence and outbound platform that handles prospect search, enrichment, research, playbooks, personalized email and deliverability in one place. Ashok spent years at Responsys and 6sense watching revenue teams drown in disconnected tools, and he started Pristine Data on a contrarian bet: in a market that rewards volume, precision wins.You will hear why a tight ICP matters more than a bigger list, how the message has to change by buying role and seniority, and why Ashok adds a third pillar to right person and right message: right time. Jonathan and Ashok compare notes on a surround-sound, multi-touch approach, and on the tension between precision and the volume it still takes to get noticed. Ashok also tells the founder story straight: two months of demos with no sales, a product rebuilt on what the recordings revealed, a first outbound campaign in July, and a first paying customer who found him through an AI-personalized email. Revenue has been growing since August 2025, and he has chosen not to chase a seed round yet.His closing advice for founders is to be ruthless with your time, because time, not money, is the real currency.Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.comConnect with Ashok Rajan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajanashokPristine Data AI: https://www.pristinedata.aiEnjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit The Artesian Network.

Every major AI training operation is quietly running into the same wall: the speed at which silicon can move data between chips. Every new GPU cluster a hyperscaler adds makes the problem more expensive.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Vivek Raghunathan of Xscape Photonics — the deep-tech company spun out of Columbia University research to attack the bandwidth bottleneck at GPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-memory interfaces inside AI data centers. Xscape's core platform is a scalable multi-color laser system: custom silicon photonics built for hyperscale data centers and AI infrastructure operators.This is not a software company with a slick demo. It's a materials and systems company making a long, capital-heavy bet — and the conversation digs into what that takes: the moment Columbia research stopped being research and started feeling like a company that had to exist, what the skeptics got wrong about the market, what broke first in the university spin-out chaos and how it got fixed, and how a hardware team holds together when timelines slip. Vivek is candid about the growth challenge in front of him now: finding product-market fit and expanding into new segments.Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.comXscape Photonics: https://www.xscapephotonics.comEnjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep38&utm_content=shownotes

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Daniel Rosenrauch of Viirtue, a white-label VoIP and unified communications platform built for MSPs, ISPs, and resellers who want to sell voice services under their own brand without running the infrastructure themselves.Viirtue was founded by people who had been resellers themselves, and it positions itself as partner-first: fully managed cloud infrastructure, with billing, tax compliance, and usage rating handled for partners, plus AI call intelligence such as call transcription and sentiment analysis.Jonathan and Daniel talk about building a channel-dependent business through several market shifts — the move from on-premise to cloud, COVID, and now AI — and what it takes to keep a partner-first model together as the ground moves.Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.comConnect with Daniel Rosenrauch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viirtue-dan-rosenrauchViirtue: https://www.viirtue.comEnjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep37&utm_content=shownotes