Nikhil Gupta

CEO and Founder ArmorCode Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Nikhil Gupta founded ArmorCode in July 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, around a complaint about how enterprise security actually works: organisations run hundreds of scanners producing an unmanageable volume of findings, and the resulting backlog is treated as a queue to be worked rather than a risk to be reasoned about. ArmorCode consolidates those findings, works out which ones carry real business impact by surfacing exploitability and attack paths, and pushes remediation through to the teams that own the code and infrastructure. The company now describes itself as an agentic control plane for unified exposure management, with an agent workforce it calls Anya and a context risk graph wired into hundreds of security and developer tools. It is Gupta’s second security company; the first, Avid Secure, was acquired by Sophos.

Career Highlights

• Founded ArmorCode in July 2020 and has led it as CEO throughout, per the company’s own anniversary post and leadership page.
• Previously founded and ran Avid Secure, a cloud security company, through its acquisition by Sophos.
• Announced $16 million in new strategic funding in March 2026, led by Cheyenne Ventures with participation from Ballistic Ventures, Highland Capital, Sierra Ventures, NGP Capital, Harmonic Growth Partners, Tau Ventures and Cervin Ventures, taking ArmorCode’s total raised to $81 million.
• Doubled year-over-year revenue, with the platform processing more than 200 billion security findings a year across hundreds of integrations for Global 2000 enterprises.
• Brought Phil Venables — former Chief Information Security Officer of Goldman Sachs and of Google Cloud — onto ArmorCode’s board of directors in March 2026.
• Built a board and advisory bench drawn from across the security industry, including Mark Fernandes of Sierra Ventures, Corey Mulloy of HighlandX, Barmak Meftah of Ballistic Ventures, and advisors including former AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan, former Cloudera and ArcSight CEO Tom Reilly, and former Fortify CEO John M. Jack.
• Positioned ArmorCode as a recognised leader in exposure management and application security posture management, including an IDC MarketScape ASPM vendor assessment and a CRN Stellar Startup listing in 2025.

Professional Journey

Gupta describes himself as a problem solver first: every time he sees something inefficient that could be done better, he says, it pushes him to solve it. That disposition shows up in the shape of both his companies, which attack the operational mess around security rather than detection itself.

Avid Secure was the first. He founded it and ran it as chief executive, building a cloud security business that Sophos acquired, giving him an exit and the credibility to raise for a second attempt. He brings, by his investors’ count, more than twenty-five years of experience building businesses.

ArmorCode started in July 2020. The premise was that vulnerability management as practised was an artefact of an earlier era — a queue of findings, triaged by severity scores that say nothing about whether a given flaw is reachable or exploitable in the environment it actually sits in. His public framing has been consistent since: security has to fundamentally rethink risk for the digital age, and the useful measure is not how many findings a team closes but how much risk it removes. By the company’s fourth anniversary in July 2024 the platform was handling billions of findings from more than 240 scanners, serving dozens of Fortune 500 companies in media, financial services, healthcare and industrial sectors, and running millions of workflows for thousands of security professionals and tens of thousands of developers.

The AI wave reshaped the product and the pitch. ArmorCode now sells AI exposure management alongside its original application security posture management, arguing that the same governance problem applies to AI systems — and, in the other direction, that agents are the way to work a backlog no human team can. In March 2026 the company announced $16 million in new strategic funding led by Cheyenne Ventures, bringing the total raised to $81 million, with revenue doubled year over year and Phil Venables joining the board. Gupta’s stated case for the raise was the scale of what is coming: five trillion AI agents projected by 2030, each one an asset somebody has to govern.

He runs the company alongside two co-founders — Praneet Khare, who leads engineering and the India operation, and Deepak Yadav, its chief architect — with a chief product officer, chief financial officer and chief marketing officer completing the executive team.

Education

No education record for Nikhil Gupta was found in any source reviewed. Two previously recorded entries, both with ambiguous degree values traceable only to aggregators, were removed; see the internal verification notes.