Yasir Khalid, StrikeReady, Inc. Founder and CEO: “Operators can isolate impacted assets or mitigate threats before an attacker moves, turning traditional ticket chase into genuine risk management.”

Founded in 2019 by cybersecurity veteran Yasir Khalid, StrikeReady, Inc. is on a mission to revolutionize the way modern security operations are run. Born out of firsthand experience on the front lines of incident response at FireEye, Khalid recognized two persistent and critical challenges in the cybersecurity landscape: the overwhelming complexity caused by fragmented point tools, and the global shortage of skilled security analysts. StrikeReady was created to solve both problems by combining elite security tradecraft with cutting-edge artificial intelligence, enabling security teams of any size to operate at maximum effectiveness.

StrikeReady offers a cloud-native, vendor-agnostic Security Command Center built to unify and streamline operations across today’s highly fragmented enterprise security stacks. Its platform serves as a centralized, intelligent control hub for cybersecurity, enabling mid-to-large enterprises—particularly in sectors like insurance, retail, banking, oil & gas, and manufacturing—to combat sophisticated threats with unprecedented efficiency. At the core of StrikeReady’s solution is its unified data fabric, capable of ingesting telemetry from over 750 integrations spanning endpoints, cloud infrastructure, OT, IAM, and more. This extensive visibility is paired with a Large Action Model that allows teams to execute complex playbooks using plain English, eliminating the need for coding expertise. The platform also includes a robust Threat Intelligence Exchange, aggregating data from over 100 curated threat feeds and dark web sources.

One of StrikeReady’s most groundbreaking innovations is CARA—an AI-powered analyst that works alongside human teams to amplify their capabilities in threat hunting, triage, and remediation. Additionally, StrikeReady’s continuous security validation ensures that organizations can measure the effectiveness of their controls in real time, helping them stay resilient against evolving threats. With offices in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, StrikeReady is strategically positioned to support a global client base. The company continues to grow rapidly, driven by its commitment to empowering security teams to “fight above their weight.” By simplifying complexity and augmenting human capability with AI, StrikeReady is redefining what’s possible in cybersecurity operations.

In conversation with Yasir Khalid, Founder and CEO of StrikeReady, Inc.

StrikeReady’s CARA is hailed as the first AI analyst natively integrated into security workflows. How does CARA’s real-time learning from global defender experiences enhance threat resolution, and what measurable efficiencies have clients achieved (e.g., 5x analyst productivity)?

CARA doesn’t just chat; she learns how your own analysts and the wider StrikeReady community solve problems, then turns that crowd wisdom into recommended queries, pivot paths, and automated fixes. In production we see incidents handled jump from 10 to 30 per analyst per day and mean-time-to-respond drop from 90 to 14 minutes—about a 3× productivity lift and nearly 6× faster MTTR.

Your platform is vendor-agnostic with 750+ integrations. How does this approach break down silos in security stacks, and what advantages does it offer over proprietary solutions in industries like healthcare or finance?

Because we speak every major API and data dialect, analysts pivot across any best-of-breed tool without context-switching. That means customers across industries, including regulated industries, keep the point products they trust while operating as one system of record—something larger vendors with the motivation to build platforms across their own tools fail to deliver due to their motivation to sell as many of their own tools as possible.

Strike Ready claims to reduce dwell time by 75x and improve threat detection by 40%. Can you share a use case where these metrics directly mitigated a high-risk threat, such as a zero-day exploit or ransomware attack?

A Fortune 500 healthcare provider was hit with an information stealer. By feeding zero-day indicators into our Exchange and letting CARA auto-validate controls, we detected C2 traffic four minutes after the first beacon. Attacker dwell time fell from roughly 10 hours to under eight minutes—about 75× faster—and we uncovered lateral-movement artifacts their SIEM missed, lifting overall detection coverage 40 %.

With SOC teams overwhelmed by alert fatigue, how does StrikeReady’s “unified, end-to-end visibility” transform reactive triage into proactive risk resolution, particularly in sectors like government or critical infrastructure?

We model assets, identities, and vulnerabilities on a graph. When an alert lands, the platform instantly shows the blast radius. Operators can isolate impacted assets or mitigate threats before an attacker moves, turning traditional ticket chase into genuine risk management.

Strike Ready is a Gartner Tech Innovator in Advanced Virtual Assistants. What makes your AI distinct from conventional tools, and how do features like natural language processing (NLP) democratize expertise for junior analysts?

Most tools stop at “chat.” CARA pairs deep NLP with our large action model. A tier-1 analyst can type, “Is CVE-2025-21887 exploitable here?” CARA checks exposure, spins up an exploit simulation, and then mitigates or opens a ticket, all from that one natural-language request. It’s analysis and action in a single loop, which is why Gartner singled us out.

Your Threat Intelligence Exchange integrates 100+ curated feeds. How does this collective defense model preempt emerging threats like APTs, and what role does dark web monitoring play in client risk mitigation?

We normalize every feed (commercial, open-source, ISAC, darknet marketplaces) into a single scoring model, then retro-hunt those IoCs across each organization’s historic telemetry. Customers often get warnings on campaigns like Sidewinder days before the indicators hit public repos. Dark-web collection adds early notice of stolen credentials and ransomware “name-and-shame” posts so teams can act before extortion demands arrive.

Meet the leader behind the success of the company StrikeReady, Inc.

Yasir Khalid is the Founder and CEO of StrikeReady, Inc., a cybersecurity innovator transforming SOC operations. With over a decade at FireEye leading threat detection and earning 17 patents, he later spearheaded research and threat intelligence at BlueHexagon. In 2019, he founded StrikeReady, which has raised $12 million in Series A funding and now protects over 100 customers globally. Recognized by Gartner as the sole “Advanced Virtual Assistant” innovator in cybersecurity, Yasir empowers organizations to counter advanced threats using their existing resources, redefining how modern SOCs operate.

“Because we speak every major API and data dialect, analysts pivot across any best-of-breed tool without context-switching.”