Yuriy Bulygin

Co-Founder & CEO Eclypsium, Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Yuriy Bulygin is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eclypsium, a security company he started in 2017 to address a layer of the computing stack that most security tooling simply cannot see. Antivirus, endpoint detection, and cloud security products all run on top of an operating system, and therefore inherit the assumption that the firmware and hardware beneath that operating system are trustworthy. Bulygin spent a decade at Intel demonstrating that this assumption does not hold. He created CHIPSEC, the open-source framework that became the standard tool for assessing firmware and hardware security, and built Eclypsium to commercialize the discipline he calls infrastructure supply chain security.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of Eclypsium since 2017, alongside fellow former Intel researcher Alex Bazhaniuk.
• Creator of CHIPSEC, the open-source firmware and hardware security assessment framework.
• Led the microprocessor security analysis team at Intel Corporation and the Advanced Threat Research team at Intel Security.
• Built Eclypsium’s firmware coverage past 11 million distinct firmware types, growing by nearly a million annually.
• Member of the Forbes Technology Council and a recurring RSA Conference speaker.
• Holds a PhD from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Professional Journey

Bulygin grew up near Chernobyl in Ukraine and later emigrated to the United States, settling in the Portland, Oregon area and becoming a naturalised citizen. He completed a doctorate at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology between 2002 and 2006, then joined Intel, where he spent roughly a decade working on the security of the company’s own silicon and platform firmware.

That work put him in an unusual position. As leader of the microprocessor security analysis team at Intel Corporation, and later of the Advanced Threat Research team at Intel Security, his job was to find the vulnerabilities that existed below the operating system — in BIOS and UEFI firmware, in management engines, in the boot process itself. These are the components that establish whether a machine can be trusted at all, and compromises at that level survive operating system reinstallation and are invisible to security software running above them.

To make that research repeatable, Bulygin built and open-sourced CHIPSEC, a framework for assessing the security of platform firmware and hardware configuration. It became the standard tool in the field, used by researchers, vendors, and enterprise security teams to test whether systems are configured securely at the firmware level, and its adoption established his reputation well beyond Intel.

He co-founded Eclypsium in 2017 with Alex Bazhaniuk, another Intel researcher, to turn that capability into a product. The company’s framing of the problem is that enterprises have spent two decades securing software while treating the hardware and firmware they buy as a trusted given — even though that equipment arrives through long, opaque supply chains, receives firmware updates from multiple vendors, and is increasingly targeted precisely because defenders are not watching. Eclypsium monitors firmware and hardware integrity across laptops, servers, and network devices, analysing over 11 million distinct firmware types and adding close to a million more each year, to detect implants, misconfigurations, and known-vulnerable components at the layer beneath the operating system.

Education

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT)

PhD, 2002-2006