In this segment from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders series, Kunal Agarwal, founder and chief executive officer of dope.security, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the evolution of network security and the shift toward on-device processing. Agarwal explains the company's "fly direct" philosophy, which eliminates the need to reroute internet traffic through external data centers by running security directly on the user's laptop. He highlights how this architectural shift provides a massive performance boost – often increasing speeds by 5X – while sitting side-by-side with existing endpoint protection solutions to replace legacy proxy architectures.
The conversation delves into the role of AI in modern defense, particularly through dope.security’s "Dopamine" Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tool. Agarwal describes how the company uses large language models to provide precise data protection, such as monitoring sensitive uploads to generative AI platforms without storing customer data. By prioritizing superior user experience and AI-native development, he argues that cybersecurity must move beyond stale legacy models to meet the high-speed demands and visibility requirements of the 2026 enterprise.
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Kunal Agarwal, dope.security
Inna Tokarev Sela is the CEO and founder of Illumex. The platform enables companies to extract value from structured data, creating a virtual semantic graph for users to interact with in natural language. Illumex focuses on contextualizing data in real-time and offers built-in governance features. By partnering with major data platform providers, Illumex has increased data usage for customers. The company has raised $13 million and has a diverse workforce. Inna's leadership style is described as empathetic. Illumex envisions a future where data interactions are seamless and efficient. Overall, the company aims to lead the industry towards a more streamlined application-free future.
play_circle_outlinedope.security branding emphasizes passion, design, user experience
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineFly Direct: AI-Native On-Laptop DLP Using OpenAI, Bypassing Zscaler Proxies and Integrating with CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Palo Alto for Fortune 250
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlinePerformance improvements: customers saw up to 5x bandwidth increases
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineData privacy: doesn't train models on customer data or store customer content
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineSimplicity and Practical AI: How Modern UX Beats Legacy Vendors in Sales, Engineering, and Contract Review
In this segment from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders series, Kunal Agarwal, founder and chief executive officer of dope.security, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the evolution of network security and the shift toward on-device processing. Agarwal explains the company's "fly direct" philosophy, which eliminates the need to reroute internet traffic through external data centers by running security directly on the user's laptop. He highlights how this architectural shift provides a massive performance boost – often increasing speeds by 5X – ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is the origin or reasoning behind the company's name "dope.security"?add
How does the product work and where does it run, how does it differ from legacy network or endpoint security solutions like Zscaler/Netskope, and how do you use AI (e.g., LLMs) to detect and block sensitive data uploads such as to ChatGPT?add
What are some anecdotal use cases or customer examples showing the benefits (for example, performance improvements) of adopting dope.security?add
How is customer data handled and protected — is it stored in a multi-tenant or single-tenant way, is any customer data shared, who (you or the customer) can use it, and do you store or use customers' data to train your AI models?add
How does being an AI-native company give you an advantage over more established competitors, and how are you embedding AI across different parts of the business?add
>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here at theCUBE's NYSE Studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studios connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our Cyber Leader Series: Zero Trust. All the cyber security leaders come in, talk to theCUBE, and really break down the core issues happening as cyber becomes native to everything that we do, is being built in on all applications, certainly cloud native infrastructure, and now the AI native apps. Got a great CUBE alumni here, Kunal Agarwal, who's founder and CEO of dope.security. What a dope name. Back to theCUBE. We saw you in RSA last year. Great to see you again.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Well, how can I not be here, right? It's the middle of a blizzard. 150 plus shows for you all. I had to come back and come down into the Stock Exchange. I mean, this is where it all happens, right?
John Furrier
>> Well, thanks for coming in. Again, hundreds of leaders coming in. You're our 150th leader. First of all, I got to ask about the name because it's a great names.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Dope name. dope.security.
Kunal Agarwal
>> That's right. Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Great URL.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Well, I mean, I think-
John Furrier
>> Dope....
Kunal Agarwal
>> the GTLD and the domains are super helpful, but I think for me personally, being born and raised in the Bay Area, we say dope every five minutes. So I can't go five minutes without saying, "Hey, that's dope." And for us it's like a cultural phenomenon, right? But you say Top Gun 2 is a dope movie, then New York Stock Exchange is dope. theCUBE is dope. But for me personally, dope.security, it's about passion. Every single person in the company uses and envelopes, and they kind of immerse themselves in the technology. But secondly is the design and user experience. That's really important to us. And last, but not least, is the attention to detail.
John Furrier
>> So talk about the founding origination story, where you guys are at progress wise. Size. You mentioned before you came on camera, you got some engineers in Ireland, all over the world. Give us the stats.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, well, I think the story really is that I've been in cybersecurity my whole life. I started off as a child hacker, almost went to jail. And then from there I went to Berkeley. And from there I learned, I say I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, but I went to UC Symantec for my masters. And I learned a ton there. Worked in all kinds of product management in different areas. And you learn the details of how things work, but you also really learn about the flaws. How can I make something better? And for me personally, my whole goal has always been how can you better technology?
John Furrier
>> Well, as they say, go Bears.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, go Bears.
John Furrier
>> If you're in New York, it's Cal. Berkeley, Cal. Great school. Again, just transitioning from the trajectory. You got in college and then Symantec, those were the thrusts of the cloud movement, right?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Oh, yeah.
John Furrier
>> So you saw that. What got your attention? What was the focus? What was driving you right then?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, there's these big cybersecurity players, the big profit centers. And dope, ultimately, we always, and me personally, I always love these big profit center areas. Something that can be a mainstream franchise business and that ultimately is network. And if I look at a Zscaler or Netskope or what used to be Blue Coat and Websense, so back in the day, you might remember these names.
John Furrier
>> I do. Websense, oh, yeah.
Kunal Agarwal
>> The way they used to work was very simple. They were like an airplane flight. But you're flying from New York to Florida and you'd be stopping over in Texas or California for a security check. Now, let me ask you, would you ever take a stopover flight if you could?
John Furrier
>> No. Direct.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Always fly direct.
John Furrier
>> First class. Upgraded.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Exactly. So that's the-
John Furrier
>> Quality of service.
Kunal Agarwal
>> That quality of service, that fly direct, that performance that you want to have, that's what dope is all about. And so the way we work is that we run on your laptop instead of in a data center or in some sort of an infrastructure. And so that makes the whole complication go away. And so we say dope.security is about fly direct. You run completely on your laptop. That's why there's an airplane on my bag over there because we say dope.security is fly direct.
John Furrier
>> All right, let's talk about the market. You're going after the big profit center. Where was the opportunity? Obviously you mentioned Zscaler, networks are key there. Endpoint protection is another category. Are you crossing both or is it a zero trust network?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Most of our customers, they've kind of lived with these legacy players. They had to reroute their entire internet. Make no mistake, the way these technologies worked, I used to work at these companies, you'd have to take your entire internet, run it from your laptop to this data center provided by the vendor, and then send it from there to the actual internet. Which doesn't make that much sense. And so what we do differently, like I said, is that the software sits side by side with a CrowdStrike or a SentinelOne, or whatever, or even the VPN players like a Palo Alto or a FortiClient, or whatever it is. And we operate side by side very well, but we replace a Zscaler or Netskope.
John Furrier
>> All right, so I've always loved the security paradigm around networks. Networks used to be the dumb pipes, moving packets from point A to point B, kind of like a flight. But now you have network telemetry, you have a lot of ... You can see things moving. Horizontal, lateral movement. How has that changed? Now you've got the AI wave hitting, surface areas are massive, there is no perimeter. How do you guys think about that? Or you guys-
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, it's a great question. I usually think about it as data, right? So there's always going to be these intrinsics like bare bones, like, "Hey, do you have water here? Great, beautiful." But then there's more complex stuff. So for example, a lot of our customers, they're going to be using, as an example, ChatGPT. And they go in and they have their employees uploading sensitive data to ChatGPT. So how do they block that? So what we do differently is that we say, "Hey, someone's uploading something." So we get a signal. We determine there's an upload, we classify it using OpenAI in our case, and then we block it if it's sensitive. And you think about that for a second, and you're kind of using these new technologies, large language models, to protect companies against cyber attacks, which what used to be used as the very complex ways of doing this.
John Furrier
>> All right, so let me put my skeptic hat on for a second. Like, whoa, I already got security covered. It was shifting left in DevOps. Why should I use you? What do you do differently? What's the game changer? Do you move the needle? And what does that even mean?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Well, ultimately you said it before, it's fly direct, right? And so for us, if you're adopting a new architecture, A, that you're running on the laptop, but B, what I mentioned second is about using AI to do data protection, you've completely changed how effective your product is and how reliable and performant it is as well. When you take those things together, smash it together, that's why we have multiple Fortune 250 companies that use dope today. We have many companies, everywhere from your favorite VC or private equity company to some of your healthcares, to your biggest banks.
John Furrier
>> Take us through the side by side. You mentioned CrowdStrike, Palo Alto. How do you sit in that security portfolio? What's the rationale? Do you make it easier? Take us through some of the deployments.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, for example, one of our customers that signed up, massive casino over in the Vegas area, and they switched over from a Zscaler. They wanted to get much better performance. And obviously they get that with us. And they also get much better accuracy and precision because instead of using pattern matches like Regexes and saying, "Hey, a 16-digit number is a credit card number." We can both agree that's probably true, but it's not always true. A 15-digit number could also be a credit card number, like an American Express card. And so by using AI to do that, it's much more accurate, much more precise, but most importantly for everyone out there, you're like, okay, you get the accuracy, you get the performance and reliability, it's a game changer.
John Furrier
>> And what's some examples? Can you share some anecdotal use cases?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Oh yeah.
John Furrier
>> And love letters you get, like, "Hey, with dope, this is what we saw."
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, just take it metrically simple is that we had a customer, they have people all around the world, over 100,000 employees and they went from 25 megabits per second to 125 megabits per second on average. So 5X performance increase just by moving to dope.security. And that's insane when you think about it. We're moving at this lightning fast speed today, you're not okay. And most of our employees, even internally at dope, but also around the world, they don't want to be slowed down by security. They want to just be invisible.
John Furrier
>> How about the data? Obviously as you get more customers in, is the data multi-tenant, single tenant? Do you share data? Because you're getting routes. You're like FlightAware. that plane is-
Kunal Agarwal
>> It's crazy, right?
John Furrier
>> So talk about the data piece of it. How does that work? Do you guys use it? Does the customer use it?
Kunal Agarwal
>> So we ultimately are trying to protect people from their data being exfiltrated, but we do a lot of things around that. You might have remembered the CASB days. So what we did is we built this CASB neural where we say, we're using AI to do both DLP as well as posture management and such as well. So instead of thinking about it in the terms of the way we would do in the past, which is like a scheduled scan, pattern matches, we just use AI and agentically use that to do that instead. But when I look at that, we call it dopamine. So dopamine is our DLP so to speak.
John Furrier
>> That's good. Keep everyone up and excited.
Kunal Agarwal
>> So when we think about dopamine, it's very important that we keep the customer's data safe. So A, we don't use any of their data to train our models. Not that we need to. And B, we don't store any of the data. Once we use it, we get rid of it.
John Furrier
>> I have to ask you about what's changed. Right now, if you look at companies like Rubrik, who's doing data backup and recovery, became cyber resilience. That's now a hot category. But yet cyber resilience means many different things depending who you talk to. Whatever CISO. And the resilience bar in most enterprises are super high. How do you view cyber resilience, the resilience bars in most organizations, and what's changed the most right now in today's market in terms of activities, value you guys do?
Kunal Agarwal
>> I think there's an evolution of technology that's happening. And we can pick on cyber resilience, but it also expands across all categories is that the way in which you'd be building products 20 years ago is very different than the way you're building it 10 years ago, which is very different than the way you're building it today. And today, we have, in a way, reinvented ourselves even in the last five years. The way we were building the product five years ago, it's different than today. Today, almost 80% of our code is written by AI, and we are doing that to move faster and also to avoid the problem of the past, which is staleness. You cannot be stale. You have to be moving at a lightning speed.
John Furrier
>> What's interesting about some of the AI-native development, if you could say OpenClaw for instance, all that's being done on an iMac. People are buying more iMacs now because they're running OpenClaw.
Kunal Agarwal
>> These Mac minis, these Mac minis are killing it right now.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, Apple stock's up. But that shows the way the developers are going. So more resident code on machines, called localhost before, but now you have ... And then they're being deployed in the wild. How does that impact you guys at all, if any? Does that change your thinking?
Kunal Agarwal
>> There's two aspects. One is that we detect these kind of things and provide that visibility to the enterprise and they can block it, and so on and so forth. But I think there's also an inspiration that I like to draw from things like an OpenClaw. When I look at OpenClaw, and it used to be called MoltBot, and then I think ClawdBot before that. And so I look at those things and I say, "Hey, how can we be inspired by the world around us rather than being scared of it?" And so for us it's like, well, our engineers jump right into line. As you mentioned earlier. They're very passionate people. And they go in and say, "Hey, instead of working the way that we were working five years ago, what if we could work like today?" And look, ultimately, we have to build a very stable product that can work in a Fortune 100 as well as a company that has 30 people.
John Furrier
>> And it's a great culture you have there because there's two sides to that OpenClaw and the MoltBot, was that half the world freaked out. Skynet's crazy agents going to take over because they didn't have a nice meme out of it. Replace the human and negotiate with each other. On the other half of the optimist world was this is how agents are going to behave. And so you saw kind of a first look at what might be a steady state of agent to agent. Now that's an abstraction above the network, but yet it's tied to it. Stuff's crossing over. What's your thought around that? Because if you believe that to be true, which I do, it was kind of like a DeepSeek moment for agents in the sense that DeepSeek kind of showed a new way to do things. But that to me is a tell sign.
Kunal Agarwal
>> I think the world is about seeing things around you and using that as information and almost like inspiration. As I mentioned earlier, there's a defining moment and an inflection point right now in cyber security is that, hey, are you going to move with the times or are you going to be lost in the past? And that's where we personally make a really conscientious effort of saying, "This needs to be modern. It's 2026, your cybersecurity software can't be acting like it's 2015." And honestly, most of them act like it's 2006 still.
John Furrier
>> So you mentioned Zscaler earlier, they're a great company performance-wise. They are a network approach. What's different now in the modern era for you guys versus, say, Zscaler?
Kunal Agarwal
>> I kind of pull it back into being an AI-native company. We have to use what advantages we have today because they have 18 years over us. Look, I graduated high school in 2009. They started in 2008. And in the world that they live in is a very not a big focus on design, not a big focus on UX. Those are important to companies today because these technologies have to be adopted much faster. Nobody would use ChatGPT if it was difficult to use, but because it's so easy to use is why people use it. And the same thing goes for cyber as well. When you look at the type of companies we see, people are thinking about these things. They don't have 100 person teams to manage this stuff anymore. And if you take that plus you think about can we embed AI into each element of dope as a company, sales, whether that's a BDR or a sales function, or even like a contract review can be done with, in our case ChatGPT. Or as an example, if I look at the engineering process, there's not a single engineer in dope that's not using Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, why wouldn't ... That's great products.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Right. But when you say why wouldn't they, it's like is there a, not just leadership, but also inside the company, are they passionate enough to go in and do that?
John Furrier
>> So your view is the modern era, UX is a differentiator, AI native is a differentiator?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Correct. And we embody that every day. And we have an architectural differentiation that I can go to any customer. If you were a Zscaler customer today, I would say, "Look, you are stopping over on your way to the internet. Do you want to be doing that or would you rather be in a private chat?"
John Furrier
>> Yeah. And you can see everything. You get the telemetry, you get the observability.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting. Go back two years ago at RSA, last year when you first came on theCUBE, a different year, but two years ago, it's hard to pull BS on cyber as you know. So agents was just coming out. Everyone pooh-poohing the, "Oh, agents is bullshit. It's all hyped up. It'll never happen." Last year at RSA, we saw real use cases of agents. I'm curious what this year at RSA is going to be like and at Black Hat, how agents have adopted into the workflow, because there's clearly low-hanging fruit use cases where agents in security, with good UX, would be a dream scenario. So the question, how do you see this year's vibe on agents? Vibe quotes, not vibe coding. Do you think the sentiment's going to be accelerated into more real use cases, execution?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Well, I can tell you what I hope for. What I hope for in my dream is that people build pragmatic security products, where instead of trying to go in and chase a marketing story and a buzzword, you're actually building that into your product. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that our technology, yes, we use OpenAI underneath the hood all the time, and we tell our customers that because we want them to be aware of it. We're not trying to say that we went and built these big large-language models, but we've built it in a way that's easy for a company .
John Furrier
>> You're not faking the wrapper scene, which everyone's doing.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yes. Well, I mean it's fine to say that-
John Furrier
>> A lot of people are doing it....
Kunal Agarwal
>> you're an AI company, but at the end of the day you're a wrapper on ChatGPT. Which is fine to say, but just be real about it.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah. It's not scalable, not durable.
Kunal Agarwal
>> And cybersecurity has been built on this idea of almost a little bit of a culture of openness. Mark my words, every cyber company, a big cyber company like Symantec I used to work at, they share data with other cybersecurity companies as well. And in terms of selling, we also need to be open about that too.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Also, the narrative this week, the stocks are getting crushed here, is the SaaS apocalypse. So there's two schools of thought. Yes, you're vulnerable. Everyone knows that. That anyone can come out of the woodwork, two kids in the dorm room or a couple guys in the boardroom just dictating strategy. But it's hard to pull off. So as the UX, AI becomes a differentiator, you still have platform level thinking-
Kunal Agarwal
>> Correct....
John Furrier
>> around moats, of record. How do you think, as a modern CEO cyber leader, how do you think about that when you build out your teams and the products?
Kunal Agarwal
>> I think we have to-
John Furrier
>> And who are you going after?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Yeah, well, we have to have the maturity and the people themselves. So for example, today, one of our engineering leaders was like, "Oh yeah, we already got the Claude security tool," which is a code security tool, in addition to our existing tool, which is Sonar Cloud. And I think about that for a second. I'm like, "All right, that's great. It's already implemented, it's already kind of getting up and running," and so on and so forth. Obviously there's time it takes to get up and running, but these guys have made it quite easy to go in and do that. Now, do I think that's a big competitor to these major cybersecurity companies? No.
John Furrier
>> No.
Kunal Agarwal
>> There's just no relation to each other. We're using it. There's no threat in terms of that. The thing is that when you're using these tools, of course they're going to go in and build something like that. There's so many cybersecurity startups I can point to you to that do the same thing as that particular feature as well. But why would I buy it from them when I can buy it from someone who's doing this at a scalability-
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, the old tools versus platform debate. Go back say 15 years ago or even a decade ago, it was, I'm a platform, they're a tool. And the tools are, in essence, platforms. So you have best of breed tooling, categorical definition, but it's ultimately a data platform, in this case network platform. What's your reaction? Is that still kind of the same? Is it evolved?
Kunal Agarwal
>> Look, there's some people that do it well, there's some people that don't. I mean, I can tell you, when I used to work at these big companies, we had this big platform and you could go on a thing like this and say, "Oh, we have a platform." But the reality is that your products barely even work together.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah.
Kunal Agarwal
>> And if I showed you these products ... Like if you went to dope.security and signed up for our product today, you would be able to get up and running, no problem. But you wouldn't be able to do that with any other cyber company. Why is that? Because they don't even have a free trial on their website. And that's where we have to think, again, back to the user experience. Why does it take so much effort and this PhD level knowledge to get you up and running?
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Awesome. Well, great to have you on our Leaders series. I guess the final question for you is kind of self-serving, but I'd love to get your reaction or answer. Finish the sentence, "In cybersecurity, this is the year of," blank.
Kunal Agarwal
>> This is the year of dope.
John Furrier
>> Come on. In what way?
Kunal Agarwal
>> I think we're a trendsetter in this industry. People haven't seen the way we do marketing before. You've seen some of our stuff as well. They don't see the simplicity on the interface and it is inspiring to people.
John Furrier
>> So it's the year of simplicity and user experience.
Kunal Agarwal
>> I think that the new modern technologies and tools have empowered us to be able to go in and do that. And if you're stuck in the way ... Look, you're using an Apple MacBook today. Once upon a time, somebody said that Apples will never have a place in business, and that's not true because they've made the product very easy to use and they've made it very user-friendly. And some would say that they've made it more secure than other operating systems. But yes, the reality is that Windows is used all around the world, but there's a set of people that appreciate this technology.
John Furrier
>> Build a better product. That's how they survive.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Exactly. And guess what? That's why the iPhone exists today.
John Furrier
>> Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate. Great to see you.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> Thanks for coming by theCUBE here at the NYSE Studios.
Kunal Agarwal
>> Couldn't be better.
John Furrier
>> Thanks so much. All right. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here at the NYC Wired Programs, CUBE original of course. It's an open network of leaders sharing their ideas, their vision, what their strategies are, what they're working on to bring in a better, more secure future. Again, we're live in a very hostile world on the cyber side, but also we all want to be secure and safe, and we're doing our part here on theCUBE to bring that to you. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier
Kunal Agarwal