Exclusive: Corridor raises $5.4M, hires Alex Stamos as security leader

• His decision to join full-time signals the growing urgency of securing AI-generated code — and marks a key endorsement for the startup, co-founded by Jack Cable and Ashwin Ramaswami, in a rapidly crowding field of AI-native security companies.

Driving the news: The $5.4 million seed round was led by AI-focused venture firm Conviction. Notable angel investors include Stamos, Bugcrowd founder Casey Ellis and Duo Security co-founder Jon Oberheide.

• Corridor already counts buzzy AI coding startup Cursor, fintech company Mercury and threat intelligence firm Grey Noise Intelligence as customers.

Zoom in: Corridor uses AI to automatically discover software vulnerabilities and triage bug bounty reports — including identifying context-heavy issues like authorization flaws that traditional tools often miss.

The big picture: AI has democratized who can write code — but those codebases are often riddled with security flaws that newbie coders can't detect.

• Nearly half of the programming tasks completed by AI models in a recent Veracode study resulted in code with known security vulnerabilities, the company reported last week in a test of more than 100 large language models.
• "If security teams are already struggling today, they're certainly going to struggle as engineers are using AI to write code 5-10 times faster," Cable told Axios.

Catch up quick: Stamos first met Cable and Ramaswami — both of whom are in their mid-20s — while they were students at Stanford.

• "I meet a lot of really smart students at Stanford, but very few of them are as dedicated to security as these two were," Stamos told Axios.
• Cable, Corridor's CEO, started bug hunting in high school and eventually ranked among the top 100 hackers on HackerOne.

• He later led the Secure by Design initiative at CISA, which pushed software vendors to bake in security from the start. Sixty-eight companies signed a pledge under that effort last year.
• Ramaswami, Corridor's CTO, previously worked alongside Cable at CISA and last year ran a high-profile campaign for Georgia's state Senate — making a name for himself in both tech and politics despite losing.

Between the lines: Stamos says AI is driving a wave of transformation unlike anything he's seen in his 25 years in the field — and creating an enormous gap between how code is written and how it's secured.

• "These people have no idea how the software works," Stamos added. "And so it is completely impossible for them to understand then how it can be broken."

What to watch: Corridor is building tools that act as "an assistant across every stage of the product security lifecycle," Cable said.

• The team plans to use the seed round to hire more engineers. It currently has five employees.

What's next: Stamos starts at Corridor later this month, but he's staying at SentinelOne as a strategic adviser.