Hey everyone! Hope everyone’s enjoying the last few days of summer. We’re excited to share another edition of our newsletter with you all, featuring:

Let’s get started! 🚀

“I'm Francesco, co-founder and CEO of Almanax. I'm originally from Italy, and lived in San Francisco for roughly five years. And I've been in New York for two. We’re Almanax. We're building an AI security engineer that detects and patches vulnerabilities in code.”

What inspired you to start Almanax?

“Before this, I was the Head of Product at a startup in San Francisco, where I specialized in building products to investigate exploits, specifically crypto exploits. And in those four years, we did a lot of work with law enforcement agencies, regulators, and a lot of companies that had been hacked.

Sometimes the same hack kept happening. Companies were mostly using dated security tools that were not capturing 80% of the exploitable bugs and vulnerabilities. Or, they were outsourcing security to penetration testers and auditors who were just checking things once a year. At the same time, LLMs were starting to become very promising at the task of security. And we wanted to bring human capabilities via API to security teams as well.”

“A lot of them were customers or connections I had from my previous company. So I knew it was a pain point already. We were building products for the investigation post-exploits.

So I went to them and said, ‘Hey, I know you guys don't want to get exploited. Here's how you don't get exploited.’

A lot of the early validation for us was basically, ‘Hey, we found this vulnerability, look at it.’ Then people were like ‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’

And so we got a lot of attention last year in November because we found a vulnerability in one of Vitalik’s smart contracts. Then he publicly paid us a bounty for it. So then people started flocking to the product.

And we even made a funny meme about it.”

“I knew building a brand was the hardest thing you have to do as a startup. Like, why, as a big enterprise, would I buy your product, the product of this small startup that I've never heard of?

But I think the biggest learning is that security people are very no bullsh*t type people. And so we would use this “Show me, don't tell me” type of approach in our sales motion that worked very well, where we’d scan the codebase of our target customers and find them issues.

Historically, if I find a vulnerability, you pay a bounty. I’m like, ‘Look, I don’t even want a bounty, just acknowledge that our product is something useful! And if it is, like you should integrate it in your processes.”

“I saw this amazing espresso machine that’s the most beautiful piece of hardware I’ve ever seen.

Funny thing, we’re redoing the design of our website inspired by the design and colors of this espresso machine.”

Read our full interview with Francesco here.

On September 10th, we brought together NYC’s fastest-growing community of YC founders for our monthly YC Alumni Happy Hour. This month was co-hosted by Zendesk at WORKHOUSE in Midtown.

The energy was electric and full of familiar faces but also an amazing wave of new founders. What really stood out was the quality of the conversations: incredible founders building ambitious companies and it honestly felt like seeing into the future. The YC community in NYC isn’t just growing - it’s becoming something really special.

See you all at the next one!

🗽 = NYCFC Event

Subscribe to our Luma calendar here.

Email [email protected] to have us feature your event!

We hope to see you at one of our events.

– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan

P.S.

New here? Check our website to learn more and apply to our next cohort!