Founders Everywhere: Saoud Khalifah
Saoud Khalifah is the co-founder & CEO of Ciphero, a company building the AI Verification Layer for Agents and Models.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
AI is proliferating everywhere and it’s here to stay. It shapes how we communicate, make decisions, and power the systems we rely on every day. The question is no longer if we use AI, but whether we can trust it. As its influence accelerates, the need for truth and security has never been more critical. Ciphero is building technology that safeguards AI systems from manipulation and misuse, ensuring they remain secure, verifiable, and aligned with human values. Inspired by the Roman statesman Cicero’s devotion to truth and the integrity of the republic and democracy, Ciphero places truth at the center of its mission. The name also carries a modern play on words, cipher and hero, reflecting Ciphero’s role as a cryptographic hero, making AI secure and safe for the future of humanity intertwined with AI.
Saoud Khalifah, co-founder and CEO of Ciphero, is passionate about creating ideas and software that benefit society. Before founding Ciphero, he had a successful exit with Fakespot, where he first worked with his current co-founders. Rob Gross was Saoud’s co-founder at Fakespot and brings operations, product, and marketing expertise. Sen Tian, Ciphero’s Chief AI Officer, specializes in AI verification and building novel and innovative models. Now on their second venture together, the founding team has close to a decade of collaboration experience and brings the technical skill, operational expertise, and ethical focus needed to build AI that is secure, trustworthy, and aligned with human values.
Why Ciphero and why now?
Today, companies are told they must adopt AI everywhere, but there is very little focus on how to control it or verify that its outputs are correct and safe. Large models hallucinate, can be manipulated, and can leak or mishandle sensitive information. Ciphero is building a verification layer around AI systems, a protocol that checks the truthfulness and security of AI interactions. In simple terms, Ciphero lets a company define what is “true” and what is sensitive for their environment, then automatically verifies AI behavior against those expectations. We wrap the underlying complexity so security leaders and developers can focus on policy and outcomes rather than low-level controls.
What is Ciphero’s North Star?
We operate on two levels. At the higher level, we focus on CISOs and security teams, giving them a verification and control layer around the models and applications their company uses. At a lower level, we serve developers and DevOps teams by providing an agentic verification protocol that governs AI agents and tools that can take actions on systems. In both cases, we prevent confidential data from leaking into third-party models and guard against unsafe or malicious actions. Our long-term North Star is to become the de facto verification protocol standard for AI interactions across the industry.
Tell us about some recent milestones that Ciphero has crushed?
We recently closed an oversubscribed $2.5 million pre-seed round. The goal for this capital is to build out the team and product, sign major partnerships with enterprises, and continue refining and innovating the verification layer protocol.
What sets Ciphero apart?
There are many teams concerned with AI reliability, but most are working in silos, building proprietary fixes for a single model or stack. Our advantage is a combination of deep, practical experience with trust and security, plus a protocol mindset. This allows us to anticipate emerging threats, from hallucinations to malicious manipulation of references, and build AI systems that are both reliable and resilient. We are not just tuning models; we are hybridizing trust and security into a single layer that can sit around any AI system.
How has your background influenced you as a founder?
I have been writing code since I was 11 and breaking things (in a productive sense) since I was a kid disassembling VCRs and circuit boards. As a teenager, I shifted that curiosity into software, where I was a security researcher and hacker, reporting vulnerabilities in mainstream software such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe PDF Reader and many others. Later, with Fakespot, we built one of the most recognized consumer brands for fake review detection, faced existential threats multiple times, and learned how to build durable products in adversarial environments. That background in risk-taking, security, and building from zero to one is exactly what I am applying now to Ciphero.
Any book recommendations?
I love ancient books, especially pre–modern works like Cicero’s, hence the company name. Reading authors whose work has been filtered through centuries provides a depth and authenticity that many modern, AI-assisted books lack. A piece of advice I often share is to read books written before 2020 if you want to avoid AI-generated sameness and get truly original insight.
Fun Fact:
As a stress relief from the startup life, I like catching and releasing sharks and other fish in the waters of Florida.
Listen to Ryan Lupberger, with Jenny Fielding on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Join the Cleancult. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out to all our past episodes here!
