# Elon Salfati

> I've spent 14 years learning how systems break, and now I want to build AI we can trust to do science on its own.

- **Role:** Founder and research scientist
- **Based in:** Zürich, Switzerland
- **Website:** https://elonsalfati.com/

## Short bio

Elon Salfati is a founder and research scientist working on AI security, interpretability and autonomous scientific discovery. He is a PhD candidate in AI security at Imperial College London 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.

## About

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](/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

- **AI security**: Catching multi-step breaches in autonomous AI agents with temporal knowledge graphs, and the defences that survive an adaptive attacker.
- **Interpretability**: Reverse-engineering the features and circuits inside models, and comparing the methods that find them.
- **Autonomous discovery**: Models that propose, run and check experiments on their own, and what it takes to trust their results.

## Track record

- **Salfati Group** — Founder and CEO, 2022–present. Rebuilds how companies operate so the work runs on AI agents. Elon leads the AI research, hands-on. https://salfati.group
  - VP of AI, Velocity (Acquired)
  - Interim CSO, Foresight Works
  - CTO, Franklin Park
  - AI enrichment pipelines for security root-cause analysis, Dazz (Acquired by Wiz)
  - Client, after acquiring Dazz, Wiz (Acquired by Google)
  - Launched Versity Learning, an EdTech platform, Endeavor Innovation Labs
  - Payment infrastructure for donor-advised funds · YC S22, GiveChariot
  - AI threat monitoring for law enforcement, ADL
- **Metiss** — Co-founder and CEO, 2021–2022 (Closed). Fine-tuned generative models that write end-to-end tests inside CI/CD; 85% test coverage for early adopters.
- **RELE.AI** — Co-founder and CTO, 2019–2021 (IP acquired by connqt.ai). NLP models for structured data extraction in private equity, built by a remote team of 20 across six locations.
- **Reblaze** — Director of R&D, 2017–2019 (Acquired 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%.
- **Elbit Systems** — DevSecOps, Intelligence Division, 2016–2017.
- **Israeli Intelligence Services** — Team lead, Counter-Intelligence Unit, 2012–2016. Led technical counter-intelligence operations, reverse-engineering adversarial threat vectors.

## Education

- PhD candidate in AI Security, Imperial College London (in progress)
- MSc in Cyber Security, University of Derby

## Community and investing

- UK Innovation Group (Member): Sponsored by the House of Lords to support AI adoption and startup growth across the UK and Europe.
- Angel investor

## Topics

- AI security
- Adversarial machine learning
- Mechanistic interpretability
- Interpretability
- Model training
- AI agent security
- Temporal knowledge graphs
- Anomaly detection
- Autonomous scientific discovery
- Agentic AI systems

## Elsewhere

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elonsalfati
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=SaBm5JsAAAAJ
- GitHub: https://github.com/elonsalfati
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/elonsalfati
- X: https://x.com/ElonSalfati
- Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/elon-salfati

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Source: https://elonsalfati.com/about