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Elon Salfati

Founder and research scientist

Elon Salfati

Based in Zürich, Switzerland

People tell me two things about how I explain: hard ideas get clear, and I can't do it without drawing. In nine conversations out of ten I have Excalidraw open.

The explainers work the same way. Each takes a frontier topic in interpretability or AI security, one with almost no clear write-up, and draws it out step by step for people who already know the field. The best ones also move, as short animations.

Research areas

  1. 01

    AI security

    Catching multi-step breaches in autonomous AI agents with temporal knowledge graphs, and the defences that survive an adaptive attacker.

  2. 02

    Interpretability

    Reverse-engineering the features and circuits inside models, and comparing the methods that find them.

  3. 03

    Autonomous discovery

    Models that propose, run and check experiments on their own, and what it takes to trust their results.

Track record · 3× founder

  1. Salfati Group

    2022 – now

    Founder and CEO

    Rebuilds how companies operate so the work runs on AI agents. Elon leads the AI research, hands-on.

    Roles and clients

    • VelocityVP of AIAcquired
    • Foresight WorksInterim CSO
    • Franklin ParkCTO
    • DazzAI enrichment pipelines for security root-cause analysisAcquired by Wiz
    • WizClient, after acquiring DazzAcquired by Google
    • Endeavor Innovation LabsLaunched Versity Learning, an EdTech platform
    • GiveChariotPayment infrastructure for donor-advised funds · YC S22
    • ADLAI threat monitoring for law enforcement

  2. Metiss

    2021 – 2022

    Co-founder and CEOClosed

    Fine-tuned generative models that write end-to-end tests inside CI/CD; 85% test coverage for early adopters.

  3. RELE.AI

    2019 – 2021

    Co-founder and CTOIP acquired by connqt.ai

    NLP models for structured data extraction in private equity, built by a remote team of 20 across six locations.

  4. Reblaze

    2017 – 2019

    Director of R&DAcquired by Link11

    Led four teams (35 people) across data science, engineering, product and security research, reporting to the CTO. Built ML anomaly detection with Google Research that cut false positives by 30%.

  5. Elbit Systems

    2016 – 2017

    DevSecOps · Intelligence Division

  6. Israeli Intelligence Services

    2012 – 2016

    Team lead · Counter-Intelligence Unit

    Led technical counter-intelligence operations, reverse-engineering adversarial threat vectors.

Education

  • Imperial College London

    In progress

    PhD candidate, AI Security

MSc in Cyber Security, University of Derby

Community and investing

  • UK Innovation Group · MemberSponsored by the House of Lords to support AI adoption and startup growth across the UK and Europe.
  • Angel investor

For organisers and press

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Read the short bio

Elon Salfati is a founder and research scientist working on AI security, interpretability and autonomous scientific discovery. He is a PhD candidate at Imperial College London, researching how to detect multi-step breaches in autonomous AI agents, and a three-time founder. Through Salfati Group he has served as VP of AI at Velocity (acquired), interim CSO at Foresight Works and CTO at Franklin Park, and worked with Wiz (acquired by Google) and Dazz (acquired by Wiz). Before that he co-founded RELE.AI (IP acquired) and led R&D at Reblaze (acquired by Link11) in partnership with Google Research. He started as a counter-intelligence team lead in the Israeli Intelligence Services. He is a member of the UK Innovation Group and an angel investor.

Contact

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