A Lingering Problem
Throughout my 20+ year career in cybersecurity, I have always been a skeptic and at times a contrarian. Frankly, there were very good reasons to be. Despite all the amazing advances made in technology for streamlining operations to gain efficiency and to increase productivity, we still create exponentially greater amounts of toil and rework (the time spent repeating tedious, mundane, and error-prone tasks) for our people with every new technology we deploy and operate.
How did we end up here? Weren’t we told SOAR (security orchestration automation and response) would cure the alert fatigue of security analysts and that IGA (identity governance and administration) would automate employee lifecycle management, removing the burden from IT service desks, and that compliance automation platforms would eliminate the need for GRC analysts to pester asset owners for information? Well, the reality on the ground is quite a mixed bag and at times really messy.
In my conversations with many enterprise GRC analysts, SOC operators and IT service desk teams, they all concede that the tooling helped, but with diminishing returns after the initial productivity gain. They continue to struggle with a great degree of manual and repetitive work daily. From access reviews to employee onboarding to account recovery, many vital IT tasks remain nearly impossible to fully automate.
I wondered why and was curious enough to research the reasons, not knowing at the time that this was the beginning of a new journey. Eventually, I uncovered what I dubbed “the automation gap”, which explained why existing IT, Security and GRC automation solutions are not able to deliver on their mission;
- Lack of connectors and integrations to a long tail of applications
- Lack of APIs to orchestrate legacy and more importantly increasing numbers of in-house and custom applications
- Lack of APIs for a subset of functionality - for example; isn’t it curious that the APIs for license management are missing in many SaaS applications but every other functionality is available and well documented?
- API-Tax: Similar to its cousin the SSO-tax, in which vendors move API access to the highest price tier in their bundles thus pushing them out of reach for many SMEs
- Lack of complex reasoning in automation where all the tools of the trade seem to be limited to simple decision trees which are powered by if-this-then-that style parochial sequential logical operations
- High automation error rates in legacy automation solutions like RPA (robotic process automation)
Curiosity piqued, I knew I’d found the inspiration of what could become my next venture.
The Genesis of Opnova
Fast forward to the last days of 2023. I was to host Jose Luis Ferras Pereira, my dear friend and Co-Founder/CTO at two former startups, Remotium and Fyde. He was on sabbatical, planning to tour the California coast from north to south, visiting sights along the way, especially the ones his 3 year old daughter Iris might enjoy the most. He made me promise not to pitch him a new startup idea as a condition to be my house guest. I agreed, but a couple of days after his arrival, our old habits took over and we started having our usual late night conversations about what excites us the most as of late. It didn’t take long for us to discover we were exploring answers to a similar problem but approaching it from different angles.
One of those fateful nights the idea of Opnova was conceived and we were ready to take on another journey together. Jose never left my house the entire duration of the trip. We kept talking, drawing, erasing and restarting over and over again! Around mid-January, Jose returned back to Portugal and started reaching out to founder prospects who could complement us on the mission ahead. I got busy handling my succession planning and departure from my former employer.
The Journey Ahead
By March, we had Tiago Melo and Pedro Saleiro ready to join us as co-founders, serving as Opnova’s Chief Architect and Chief AI Officer respectively. Jose and I felt truly blessed and over the moon excited. This is not hyperbole on my part. We were genuinely surprised by how lucky we were to find and connect with these amazing leaders at the right time in their careers.
On April 1st, we got to work! Perhaps not the best of days for an anniversary given the universality of April Fools day. However, we took it as a good omen and positive karma. Let’s go be foolishly optimistic and deliver on our mission to put an end to rework for knowledge workers. This very mission statement we gleefully refer to as “taking rework out work”. You can read Pedro’s blog post about how we set out to solve this massive problem that impacts every organization across the globe.
Of course, we did not start this journey alone. We surrounded ourselves with amazing people. I would like to thank our coworkers and community of supporters for backing Opnova and entrusting us to deliver on our mission. Our supporters include incredible institutional investors like Faber, ScaleX, Preface, DNX, Incubate Fund as well as a list of super angels.
The Invitation
We are always on the lookout for like minded folks who are also on a mission to tackle repetitive, manual and inefficient workflows in their organization. If this sounds like you or one of your colleagues, please contact me for early access to Opnova.
Let’s take rework out of work!
Cheers,
Sinan Eren,
Co-Founder/CEO
