Lawrence Xu
San Jose
Overview
8
8
years of professional experience
Work History
Founder & CEO
CertainAI Inc.
San Francisco
10.2024 - Current
- Developed AI safety software for enterprises, enhancing B2B SaaS solutions.
- Secured $1.2M in pre-seed funding through Antler and University of Chicago endorsement.
- Expanded product reach to over 10 enterprise clients and 200 individual users.
Co-Founder & CTO
StarCross Technology
Beijing
03.2021 - 06.2024
- Built AI-driven cybersecurity solutions for enterprises (B2B - Cybersecurity).
- Led 50+ team in GTM and R&D, launched 3 innovative products, secured 20+ patents, and published 3 papers.
- Scaled company from 0 to $10M AR in 3 years, reaching a $60M valuation.
- Raised $20M across 4 investment rounds by increasing revenue 30x ($150K to $4M) in 2 years.
- Champion of ISC Innovation Sandbox, top 10 finalist in Tencent Entrepreneurship Competition, recognized as a Beijing Specialized Tech Enterprise.
- Awarded Hurun U30 and Cyzone China 30 Under 30 Outstanding Entrepreneurs.
Senior Security Engineer
Alibaba Inc
Hangzhou
07.2017 - 03.2021
- Designed and developed AI/ML-powered cloud security products, serving 10,000+ SME clients.
- Led the growth of Alibaba Cloud's container security product from inception to $60M in SaaS ARR within one year.
- Published research at top conferences including Black Hat, DEFCON, HITB, and IJCAI.
- Co-founded the globally ranked 4th CTF hacking team (r3kapig), with two appearances in the DEFCON finals (the 'Oscars' of hacker).
Education
Bachelor of Engineering -
Beijing Jiaotong University
Beijing, China06.2017
Publications
- Beyond REST: Introducing APIF for Comprehensive API Vulnerability Fuzzing, RAID 24, Milan, Italy, 07/01/24
- Enterprise Application Data Flow Monitoring and Governance, ISC Beijing, 07/16/23
- Building Cloud-Native Container Security Defense Systems, Kubernetes Community Days Beijing, 12/12/21
- CDK: Zero Dependency Container Penetration Toolkit, BlackHat Asia 2021 Arsenal, 08/28/21
- Attack Cloud Native Kubernetes, HITB SecConf 2021, Amsterdam, 06/15/21
- Win the 0-Day Racing Game Against Botnet on Public Cloud, BlackHat Asia 2020, 10/04/20
- Hunting zero-days for millions of websites on Alibaba Cloud, XCon 2019, 08/02/19
- Enhance Security Awareness with Data Mining, BlueHat Shanghai 2019, 06/12/19
- Webshell Detection via Attention-Based Opcode Sequence Classification, AIBS@IJCAI-19, Macao CN, 03/24/19
Timeline
Founder & CEO
CertainAI Inc.
10.2024 - Current
Co-Founder & CTO
StarCross Technology
03.2021 - 06.2024
Senior Security Engineer
Alibaba Inc
07.2017 - 03.2021
Bachelor of Engineering -
Beijing Jiaotong University