The team behind Arkion.
Operators from regulated cybersecurity, now building the governance layer the machine estate never had. Authors of the NHIG Standard. Founded 2025.
We built Arkion because every enterprise we worked with had the same blind spot.
Human identity (employees, contractors, customers) has been governed for twenty years. Non-human identity (the agents, certificates, and machines that outnumber humans 80-to-1) has not. IAM was built for the wrong population.
We started Arkion to write that governance layer, and to author the Standard the industry does not yet have. Every line of product and every line of the NHIG Standard is our answer to a question we lived before we started the company: who, exactly, is accountable for the machine?
Manoj Arora & Faisal Razzak
Manoj Arora
Add contact↓Co-Founder & CEO
Manoj is Co-Founder and CEO of Arkion. He brings two decades of building and scaling cybersecurity businesses, with deep operating experience across managed defense, identity, and enterprise risk. He is the founder of Difenda: the Microsoft-based cybersecurity practice that built the Cyber Command Center to defend regulated enterprises at machine speed. Difenda was acquired by Quorum Cyber, a Charlesbank company, and its work earned Quorum Cyber the Microsoft 2025 Security MSSP of the Year.
Arkion is the governance layer he concluded did not exist. Human IAM was built for employees; nothing was built for the agents, certificates, and services now doing most of the authenticated work. Manoj leads the company, the go-to-market, and the conviction that non-human identity requires its own standard.
- DifendaFounder & CEO · ExitedFounded and scaled Difenda into a leading Microsoft-based cybersecurity practice, then exited to Quorum Cyber, a Charlesbank company. Difenda's work earned Quorum Cyber the Microsoft 2025 Security MSSP of the Year.
Faisal Razzak
Add contact↓Co-Founder & Chief Product & Technology Officer
Faisal is Co-Founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer of Arkion. He brings sixteen years of building and scaling cybersecurity products, with deep expertise in cryptography, AI-agent identity management, and post-quantum cryptography. He holds a PhD in Computer and Information Systems.
Before Arkion he was a key engineer at Venafi and then CyberArk, shipping on the machine identity roadmap behind more than $200M in ARR. At Arkion he is the architect of the certificate lifecycle core that ArkionID is built on, leads product and engineering, and co-authored the NHIG Standard: the document that names the primitives, principles, and maturity model for governing non-human identity.
- Venafi & CyberArkKey engineer · machine identityShipped on the machine identity roadmap behind more than $200M in ARR, at the company that defined certificate lifecycle management and the one that acquired it.
- DifendaEarly engineering teamPart of the engineering team that built Difenda's Microsoft-based cyber defense practice.
- Academic ResearchPhD · Computer & Information SystemsDeep expertise in cryptography, AI-agent identity management, and post-quantum cryptography.