Echo’s AI-First Platform: The Next Evolution of Cloud-Native Security

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. You know, I'm really happy to have my next guest and I appreciate him coming on.

He's, he's over in Israel and, uh, you know, we actually recorded this right before our Shabbat, so we are grateful to have Elam Milner, co-founder and CTO of Echo here on Techstrong tv. You probably have never heard of Echo. That's okay.

That's why he's here today to tell you about them. It's really a kind of remarkable story. Elam, welcome to Text on tv.

It's great to have you here. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

So, ELAM, before we even talk about Echo though, let's talk about you. Um, you're a co-founder and the CTO at Echo. Tell us a little bit of like the lead up.

You know, what, what's your story, what's your path been like, and who's your co-founder and why did you guys, you know, no one just found the company. 'cause they feel like it. They, there's always, you gotta feel it in your, in your gut, right?

Passion. So talk to us about that For sure. So, ELAM, uh, I've been an engineer for, uh, the better part of, uh, over a decade now.

So 15 years of engineering, uh, both hands-on engineering and management, uh, and leadership of engineering. Uh, I love it. It's what I do.

Mm-hmm. Um, previously I held the position of a CTO and co-founder for algon, which was the first company that, uh, my co-founder, Alon and myself have founded together. Uh, Algon was a supply chain security company, one of the first companies to, to speak the supply chain security language before it, it was cool.

Mm-hmm. So that was a, uh, that was an interesting time building it, uh, as a solution to help companies secure the way they build, write, and ship code to their production environment. Uh, we eventually got acquired by another cybersecurity, uh, company named Aqua, uh, where myself, myself and, and Elon and the team, uh, we, uh, created and led, uh, the supply chain security group there.

Uh, so then we got other scale up time, right? So, uh, before Algon was a, was a relatively young startup. Uh, Aqua was working with, uh, some of the greatest Fortune 100 companies, uh, in the world.

Uh, and we, we had to hit the ground running. Uh, so scaling up to meet those needs, I led the product and the engineering effort. Um, so a lot of interesting, uh, learning experience over there.

Sure. We did that for the past, uh, few years. Um, and once, uh, uh, just recently, uh, we founded The Echo.

So last year relatively, uh, young and up and coming, uh, company, we stayed in the same space. So I understand a lot of people might not know Echo. Uh, so, uh, I'm here, uh, I'm here to tell a little bit about the company.

Um, great. Essentially what, what we do, um, is we created an operating system that is cloud native. So meant to run everything that, uh, you run in the cloud today.

And it is designed in a way that it comes secure and enterprise ready, and it's automatically hardened and patched and tested for you using ai. Um, so I'll, I'll share a bit about, uh, about that after hitting all the right, uh, key keywords there. Mm-hmm.

For Echo, we've raised, uh, over, uh, $50 million, uh, overall. So both our, we just hit our series A round, uh, just four months after our, our previous round. Um, so it's, uh, it's an exciting, uh, time here at Echo.

Uh, we are rapidly growing. We are working today, uh, with tens of customers, all kind of amazing companies. Uh, mostly US space enterprises, uh, so companies like some of them might know like UiPath and, and EDB and, uh, vector AI and Varone is, uh, public companies Sure.

And, and large enterprises. Um, we help them kind of ship applications in a secure by design way. Um, and this is briefly about, uh, myself and about Echo.

I love it. All right. Let, let's jump, you know what, before we go any further for people who maybe are not gonna stay for the whole interview, but they're gonna go check the website or go di dive in later.

Where, where, where's where? Can they get more info on Echo? Yeah, you can just go to Echo ai.

That's our Echo website. Yeah. You'll find all, all of our story there.

Okay. Now, when we talk about AI native os for the cloud, for cloud apps, are we talking about like a hardened Linux kind of thing? Or does it run on top of Linux or, or what have you?

Yeah, for sure. So, uh, you touched on it, it's the bottom line. It's a, uh, a type of operating system specifically.

Most stuff running in the cloud today are, are Linux based. Yeah. So it is a Linux distribution based wall, uh, in that way.

But not only, um, echo itself is meant to power cloud application. So your, uh, container images, uh, your, uh, virtual machines, even your serverless functions. Uh, essentially everything you run as a company, as an engineering organization in the cloud today, uh, I want you to be able to do it powered by Echo.

And the idea is that today, companies and engineering platform team, DevOps teams, you name it, right? They all have the tedious tasks of manually fixing security issues, uh, applying best standards, uh, as they go, which is definitely not something that they love doing. Right?

Or at least, uh, the vast majority of them because they want to be focused on building new and exciting technologies for the companies they work with. Um, so instead of them having to take care of every new security issue, uh, which we get, unfortunately, we get a lot of those right supply chain attacks, those Hulu, the attacks that we just had, had a couple of them and, and similar attacks, I'm sure you, you got a dedicated episode just for that. Um, so instead of them having to, uh, do the triaging and applying the fix and testing that to make sure that nothing is, uh, was working, um, we do it for them.

They outsource it, outsource it to echo and echo powering their, uh, cloud workloads come continuously with the relevant fixes in order for them to stay secure and don't have to focus their, uh, mental capacity on applying Ts security, uh, patches. So that's the value proposition. This is how we help the teams.

So it's almost like os as a service, if you will. It is, it is where we call it autonomous infrastructure. Okay.

You made a good fancy name. OS is a service to me. Yeah.

Um, and you know what, what's the AI native aspect of it? Yeah, for sure. So fortunately we got a chance to found Echo in 2025, right?

Which is like a tipping point in engineering and creating of, of new software in the world. Um, so we knew we had to kind of, uh, go all in. And the only way for us to scale a solution like Echos was using AI hardcore off the gate to create this, uh, continuous flow of, uh, patching, hardening and testing.

Today, we're a a relatively small team. We're a under just under 40 people in the company. Um, but if you check out for example, our container store where you can use secure containers, we have close to 1000 container images today, uh, managed, operated by the team.

We could not have scaled that in that way, uh, if it wasn't for AI and specifically AI agents, LLM agents technology. So what we do is we operate and manage a fleet of AI agents and they do security research. Every time a new vulnerability, a new type of supply chain issue comes up, an agent goes out, research it, doing the triaging for the team, uh, and finding the relevant fix if it is applicable, if it is not a false positive, finding the fix, applying it to the relevant part of the underlying operating system and running all of the tests to make sure that nothing failed.

This is kind of our autonomous factory that is continuously making sure everything is, is secure and working properly. And again, there's no magic, just a lot of heavy engineering work there, uh, that we do very laser focus instead of the DevOps and platform teams having to do it in-house. I love this idea.

So you, you are maintaining the packages if you're, if it's a cloud native install, you're maintaining the containers and, and, and the continuous updates, the security updates, everything else. Now people out here watching this say, oh, this sounds great, sounds great. I'm on AWS how do I install it?

Is it in the marketplace? I go, just go to the marketplace and and hit it? Or is it something else involved?

Yeah, you can, we are in the marketplace, but uh, we are very much like a, a B2B facing enterprise type of company. Mm-hmm. So usually our customers are ones that are very much Yeah, they very, they know the play, right?

They know how to procure software. Um, you can go to our website to check out, uh, the value offering. You can go to the marketplace of the different cloud vendors like AWS, Azure, GCP and check out the offering there.

The implementation itself, it's as easy as just like a single line of code change. So instead of using, let's say as an example, the open source version of Node, if you are a no JS shop and your developer team is, is using heavily node js as a framework, you switch to echo, uh, echos node, uh, and it comes vulnerability free. Uh, so let me, so let me ask that.

So you don't have to install the Echo os you could just use Echo packages because at the underlying, it's all Linux underlying anyway. Is that, is that what you're saying? Yeah, essentially we don't install anything specifically directly on the com on the, on the cloud environment of, of our customers.

It just, Just packages. They, they use, uh, artifact or secure artifact directly. They pull them into their existing like DevOps workflow and then, So it, it's a giant, it's a big repo of secure that, that collectively make up this whole AI native os.

But it's made up of a thousand containers, I don't know how many hundreds of packages and, and so forth. Yeah. It's, it's about it just about Like, all right, I get it.

So it's very modular then It's not, you don't have to swallow the whole thing. That's if we are doing our job correctly and the underlying operating system and all of the stuff, all of the software that get bundled up into there, we can build a lot of types of, uh, workloads running in your cloud. So that's, that's the, that's the plan.

That's what we do. Beautiful. Now you raised $50 million in 10 months, those people are gonna want their money back, right?

They're gonna want a return. How do you make money of this? Yeah, so essentially customers who, uh, gain access to a repository of secure software, um, they pay us for that access.

Um, but it's, uh, you know, it's, it's a very predictable pricing model. So we don't want to put in any way the DevOps team in a position where they have to think twice before they use software that is open source. Um, so we price it, you know, we price it per the, um, per the, the, the size of the organization usually.

And, and they just consume as much, uh, software as they want. Uh, therefore goes to Oh, that's good. Yeah.

So you don't nickel and dime every time they wanna download something. It's, it's, no, I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't want to use something like that as an engineer.

So I wouldn't wanna, wanna go that way For sure. I, I don't disagree with you at all. Okay.

So you've done this raise yet, it sounds like you've got product fit. Right? So I, look, I, I didn't do this my whole life.

I, I started four or five companies myself, venture backed and sounds like you've got product fit, right? What's next? So when, uh, to touch a little bit on, on our vision, uh, right, so, uh, I believe the future goes in that direction of, of more and more of our infrastructure, specifically our cloud infrastructure becoming autonomous.

It doesn't really make a lot of sense for my team to manage underlying infrastructure, kind of like the cloud shift paradigm. Uh, so the autonomous infrastructures, I believe we'll see more and more of, uh, and specifically vulnerability management, which is like the immediate pain point, the headache. Um, I believe this vulnerability management as a manual task will, this appeal, uh, AI and AI agent as a technology will build, patch and test the underlying components that you need continuously for you, uh, using vendors like Echo.

Uh, so the, the platform teams, deving and the engineer, they can continue doing innovative work around the focus to domain. I love it. Hey, lab, I wanna thank you for coming on.

I, I know time was short. ai ai Echo ai, yeah. Is the website for people to go get more and, and look, this seems to me quite frankly, whether you are on an Amazon or, or, or Google or Microsoft or even if you're just running private cloud in the data center, you could still use Echo.

Yeah, for sure. You can and you should. Excellent.

You'll come back on, keep us posted on, on progress here, on what's doing. Okay. Thanks Alan.

Thanks for having me. Okay. Elon Milner, co-founder, CTO of Echo.

That's it. ai. You know what?

It's a, uh, uh, think of it as a repo for your Linux, for your cloud os that keeps, you know, helps your software supply chain and your, your packages and your containers. You're dealing with tested native or tested secure code. Excellent.

In today's world, we're gonna take a break on text on tv. We'll be right back.