Cybersecurity has long been a top concern for industries worldwide, with one of the most common defense strategies being penetration testing: simulated cyberattacks that uncover software vulnerabilities before real hackers can exploit them. But while this approach is essential for finding common flaws, it often relies on slow, manual processes typically performed once or twice a year. As a result, it can struggle to keep up with the growing complexities of modern software, leaving organizations vulnerable to newer, more advanced threats.
However, artificial intelligence offers a way to change that. AI-driven tools can scan code more thoroughly, simulate complex threats at scale, and map out potential attack vectors that human testers might miss.
This is where Jeevan Jutla comes in. With a background in government intelligence and offensive security, Jeevan has spent years tackling high-stakes cybersecurity challenges. Now, as co-founder and CEO of Gecko Security, he’s offering an AI-powered system that thinks like a hacker in order to find hidden flaws missed by conventional tools. By leveraging artificial intelligence to more consistently eliminate false positives, spot subtle flaws in logic, and simulate multi-step attack paths, Jeevan’s solution represents the potential for a more accurate, proactive approach to cybersecurity.
Learn how Jeevan Jutla is improving vulnerability research protocols with Gecko Security.
Jeevan Jutla’s early work in cybersecurity
Jeevan’s cybersecurity career began at the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre, where he first used AI tools to detect vulnerabilities in critical national infrastructure systems like power grids and satellite networks. He later joined Binance’s Red Team, a specialized six-person offensive security unit responsible for testing the defenses of one of the world’s largest crypto platforms.
He would continue to hone in competitive hacking spaces, ranking among the top 500 globally in cybersecurity competitions and earning over $100,000 in hackathons. Jeevan then used this funding to complete his electronic engineering degree at King’s College London in 2023.
These experiences gave Jeevan firsthand insight into how attackers exploit vulnerabilities in high-stakes systems and how advanced tools could defend against them. They also sparked his first startup idea: an AI system that simulates real-world attacks on software.
This idea proved its usefulness much earlier than expected. In the course of testing an early prototype, he and his co-founder uncovered critical vulnerabilities in their own infrastructure within hours — flaws that would have taken them days to find manually. This breakthrough led them to further explore AI’s potential to not only accelerate the testing process but also surface deeper, subtler flaws that manual methods might overlook.
That experience became the starting point for Gecko Security.
Gecko Security: AI-powered vulnerability research at scale
In early 2024, Jeevan and his co-founder launched Gecko Security, an AI-driven platform built to solve one of the most persistent problems in cybersecurity: identifying the systemic, structural flaws that attackers are most likely to exploit.
Traditionally, this has been the role of vulnerability research methods like penetration testing, where experts simulate attacks to uncover weaknesses before real ones occur. But most companies only run these tests once or twice a year, creating long gaps where new risks go undetected and making previous tests quickly outdated. And because of limited time and resources, those tests often recycle proven attack scenarios or focus on the most obvious targets, leaving subtle vulnerabilities undiscovered and leaving companies exposed to more sophisticated attacks.
That’s what Gecko Security is designed to change. Instead of relying on fixed schedules, it uses AI agents to run autonomous penetration tests on a consistent basis.
It starts by analyzing how an application is supposed to work, then builds a tailored attack framework to test the actual codebase — emulating the tactics a real attacker might use. With this system in place, instead of merely addressing each issue individually, the system connects the dots between them, revealing how smaller vulnerabilities can merge to leave an organization open to a large-scale attack.
When a vulnerability is found, Gecko verifies it by safely exploiting it in a sandbox environment to confirm it’s legitimate and not a false positive. It then provides clear context around the risk and its potential impact, along with a tested fix that developers can apply without disrupting their existing systems.
The result is a system that not only identifies security issues but also automates repetitive, time-consuming work — empowering security teams to focus on higher-level analysis while ensuring robust security throughout the development process.
Shaping the future of cybersecurity defense
Though still in its early stages, Gecko Security is already being adopted across the finance, healthcare, and tech industries. It’s backed by Y Combinator, a highly exclusive startup accelerator that’s giving Jeevan and his team the resources needed to further refine and scale the system.
As Gecko Security continues to expand, Jeevan envisions a future where AI automates the most complex parts of penetration testing, turning security into something that developers can run seamlessly as part of their daily workflow. Instead of relying solely on security specialists, engineers would be able to detect and fix issues mid-development — preventing vulnerable code from ever making it to production.
Jeevan’s long-term goal is to make security testing as accessible as development tools like Terraform or Vercel: a core infrastructure feature that runs behind the scenes, continuously protecting applications without disrupting development. Rather than acting as an occasional protocol, security would become a continuous, automated layer that runs in parallel with development — establishing a proactive approach to security rather than a reactive one.
Redefining security with AI
Jeevan Jutla and his team at Gecko Security are redefining how security is applied in the modern software era. By shifting penetration testing from a manual process to an AI-driven approach, their system is actively turning cybersecurity into a continuous, integrated part of software development.
To learn more about the future of cybersecurity, visit Gecko Security to explore its AI-powered approach to protecting modern software.
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