Aum Upadhyay is Co-Founder and CEO of Silmaril, a YC-backed AI security startup building the world's first self-healing prompt injection defense for AI-native applications and agents.

Aum studied Computer Science at Columbia University and previously built the security and privacy framework at AWS that prevented over $1.8B in damages.

After leaving Amazon, Aum and his co-founder turned whitehat hackers, successfully exploiting OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft 15 times in two weeks to understand the real attacker landscape.

Aum co-founded Silmaril with Eduardo Velasco and secured backing from Side Door Ventures and Y Combinator (YC P26), bringing deep enterprise security expertise from his time at AWS to the AI security space.

Silmaril has already stopped $28M in damages for customers, blocking 96% of real-world attacks compared to just 61% for leading guardrails, and serves top productivity, analytics, and legal companies globally.