Why We Built Evo — From My Heart

I’ve spent my career building and defending. I’ve seen the beauty of innovation and the brutality of cyber warfare. I’ve sat shoulder-to-shoulder with security engineers and platform teams in the trenches at 3AM responding to state-backed attacks where context and speed meant survival. In those moments, one truth becomes painfully clear:

Software moves fast, but attackers move faster — and security has always been forced to react.

With AI, that gap just became a chasm. Agentic AI didn’t bend the rules of software — it rewrote them. Code now evolves in real time. Systems make autonomous decisions. Supply chains mutate as fast as they are built. Meanwhile, security is still expected to play catch-up with YAML files, static policies, ticket queues, and dashboards.

Let’s be honest — we’ve entered an unfair fight.

A new defender has emerged

Across our 4,500 customers and hundreds of design partners, I started meeting a new type of warrior inside engineering teams. Not quite AppSec. Not quite platform. Not quite AI research. Something in between.

The AI Security Engineer.

They didn’t ask for this role — the AI revolution forced it into existence. And now they’re responsible for securing AI-native systems:

• Model supply chains

• Memory abuse and data leakage

• Prompt and agent manipulation

• Tool and MCP server compromise

• AI code autonomy risks

• Shadow model usage

• Agent-to-agent escalation

They stand in chaos. They don’t have full visibility. They don’t have meaningful control. And worst of all — they don’t have the tools.

Builders got copilots. Researchers got LLM platforms. Attackers got autonomous agents.

And security got left behind.

The aha moment

In the last 12 months, I spoke to over 300 CISOs, CTOs, and AI platform teams and collaborated with frontier AI leaders. Everyone was feeling the same pain, but security vendors kept responding with point solutions and marketing theater.

AI security washing was everywhere. New scanners claiming to “solve AI security.” Red flags everywhere.

We realized something fundamental:

AI security isn’t a feature. It isn’t a scanner. It isn’t a dashboard. It’s an architecture.

It must be agentic, operational, continuous, and woven into the development fabric — not bolted on.

That’s when it clicked: security must become agentic itself.

Not passive. Not reactive. Autonomous and orchestrated.

The philosophy behind Evo

At Snyk, we’ve always believed something radical: developers, when empowered, are the strongest security force on earth. That idea shaped developer security. It shaped DevSecOps. And now, it shapes AI Security.

But AI changed the game. The new hero is the AI Security Engineer — and they now need machine-speed defense.

We built Evo not as another security product but as the world’s first Agentic Security Orchestrator. Evo doesn’t just throw more alerts at you; it thinks, plans, and acts.

Through a single natural language prompt, Evo:

• Observes all AI attack surfaces (models, agents, MCPs, endpoints)

• Orients risk with context no scanner has ever had

• Decides an intelligent response plan

• Acts automatically using a team of specialized AI security agents

— Discovery, Threat Probe, Policy, Red Team, Fix, Hardening and more.

Evo puts the AI Security Engineer in command — not under burden.

Security becomes proactive. Frictionless. Continuous. Built-in.

Why we built it

We built Evo because the world cannot afford to repeat the sins of software security — bolt security on later, drown under debt, slow innovation, and lose ground to adversaries.

Innovation without security is a lie.

Security without velocity is a failure.

Evo is how we finally achieve both.

We believe in:

• Secure at Inception – shift security earlier than DevSecOps ever imagined

• Secure by Default – embed protection into AI systems automatically

• Secure by Design – make safety an architectural advantage, not a cost

We didn’t build Evo to compete in cybersecurity.

We built Evo to change the game — to make security seamless, invisible, intelligent, and unstoppable—so innovation never has to slow down again.

This is our call to the industry

The future will be agentic.

The attack surface will be relentless.

But so will we.

To every AI Security Engineer, Platform Engineer, and Defender:

This is your system. This is your moment. Join us.

Let’s secure the AI era — not by fear, but by design.

— Manoj Nair

Chief Innovation Officer, Snyk