Last Wednesday at the Blind Duck in Boston, we celebrated our 100th employee at 7AI.
A year and a half ago, this was a handful of people in a conference room. Last Wednesday it was 100 — engineers, security researchers, GTM leaders, marketers, finance, the list goes on. People who joined 7AI from some of the best companies in the world to come build this with us. And we are hiring another 100 this year.
I have started companies before. I have not seen anything like this.
This morning the Boston Globe ran a piece on us. The quote of mine they led with is the one I have been saying for months in private: "The demand is just crazy. My prior company was growing very fast, but we never saw this level of demand from the market. I can smell that something very, very different is going on here."
The reporter, Aaron Pressman, sees what is happening. So do our customers. So did the room I was standing in last Wednesday.
Here is what I think is actually going on.
For two decades, security operations has been a problem of scale and headcount. More alerts than people, more attacks than analysts, more telemetry than time. Every cycle, the answer was the same: hire more, integrate more tools, write more rules, run more dashboards. The math never worked.
For the first time in my career, the math is working. Because AI agents can do the non-human work — correlation, enrichment, triage, evidence gathering, end-to-end investigations, response — at machine speed, while humans stay on the loop owning judgment and strategy.
When customers see that work happen in their own environment, they do not need to be sold. The results speak. 95 to 99 percent fewer false positives. Investigations compressed from hours to minutes.
That is why the demand is crazy. The proof is undeniable, and nobody who has seen it wants to go back to the way it was before.
Everyone was in Boston last week for our sales QBR. The 100-employee celebration Wednesday night was a highlight, but the QBR was the main event. We covered three big things, starting with something we talk about constantly at 7AI. Someone even got us a plaque for the office:
The Michelin three-star standard is not a marketing line. It is not about being better than the restaurant down the street. It is a private, almost obsessive commitment to a level of craft where every detail matters. Every plate. Every interaction with a guest. Every signal someone picks up about whether you actually care.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to with customers. Not "good enough." Not even "great." Three stars.
It shows up in specifics. How we onboard a new environment. How we respond when something needs attention at 2am. How we write an investigation report. How we run a customer call. The three-star standard is the standard underneath everything we ship.
The two other things we spent the QBR on are downstream of it.
Extreme ownership. If a customer is stuck, it is our problem. If something is broken, it is our problem. We do not point at someone else to fix it. The fastest companies I have been part of are the ones where everyone owns everything. That is the only way three stars actually scales.
Arming our teams. A sales QBR is usually about what sales needs to hit. We inverted it. We spent the time on what sales needs from the rest of us to do the job. That inversion changes the whole conversation. Same standard, applied internally.
You can run a fast-growing company with mediocre standards. We are not interested. Speed at three-star quality is the only kind of speed that compounds.
I want to be honest about something else.
"AI SOC" is the phrase the market uses to describe what 7AI does. It is a useful shorthand. It is also too small for what we are actually building.
The SOC is one workflow. Investigations are one part of that workflow. Important — it is where we started, because it is the highest-pain entry point for almost every security team I have talked to. But it is one part of one workflow inside a much larger operation.
What security teams actually need is an operating layer for using AI agents across the entire security function. The 7AI platform now spans security operations, and the same agentic infrastructure runs underneath all of them:
That is the operating layer. The same engine, pointed at different questions. Investigations was the highest-pain entry point, so it is where we started. We will keep extending the platform, always built so the agents do the work and humans stay on the loop.
When Aaron asked me about Boston for the Globe piece, this is what I said: "There was this notion that you have to be in Silicon Valley or New York to build a cool company. Now we're proving that Boston is an unbelievable city to build these types of companies."
I meant it.
We deliberately built this company in person. Engineers, security researchers, customer teams, and GTM all in the same building in Back Bay. The collaboration that agentic security actually requires — the back and forth between design and the field reality — does not happen on a zoom call. It happens at a whiteboard, or over coffee in the kitchen, or in the 15 minutes after a customer call where someone says "wait, what if we did this differently."
The talent is already here. We just give them a place to build what they already wanted to build.
On Thursday, May 28, we are hosting the inaugural Boston Tech Week cybersecurity kickoff at F1 Arcade Seaport. Julian Edelman is opening with a keynote on resilience and the work behind the work. Three Super Bowl rings. Super Bowl LIII MVP. A seventh-round pick who built a legendary career through showing up when nobody was watching and then again when everybody was. The right note for a community of defenders and operators.
As a founding member of the Massachusetts AI Coalition alongside WHOOP and others, we are betting that Boston has a chance to be the place where AI in serious industries — security, healthcare, defense, finance — actually gets built. I want 7AI to be one of the companies that proves it.
There is more in the full press release than I will repeat here. The short version:
We will be presenting the production evidence at Gartner Security Summit on June 1-3, alongside DXC Technology CISO Mike Baker, in a session called "The World's Largest AI SOC Deployment: Proof, Not Promises." If you are there, come find us.
Back to last Wednesday at the Blind Duck.
What I was thinking about, watching the team, was that I had underestimated something. Not the technology — I believed in the technology. Not the customers — they proved it with results faster than I expected. What I underestimated was how quickly the right group of people would self-select to build this together.
A year and a half ago. From a team that fit in a conference room to 100, all in. Another 100 coming this year.
I have done this before. I know what is normal. This is not normal.
To the customers who took a chance on us early: this moment is as much yours as it is ours. You proved it works.
To the team at 7AI: This is just the beginning. Three stars. Nothing less.
To the security leaders watching from the sidelines: come find us at Gartner on June 1, at F1 Arcade on May 28, or in Back Bay any day of the week. The gap between what is possible now and what most teams are still doing has never been wider. That gap is also closing fast, in one direction or the other.
Read the full announcement: After 7 Million Investigations in Production, 7AI Widens the Gap in Agentic Security with PLAID ELITE and 100 New AI Jobs in Boston. For roles, 7ai.com/careers. For F1 on Thursday, 7ai.com/f1.