Why are we building Maze?

This is the part of the website where you might be expecting a perfectly crafted origin story. Something about how, as founders, we’ve been battling vulnerabilities all our lives, about how destiny led us to this point.

Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not the story of Maze.

In fact, there was a time when we weren’t going to start a security company at all. Having spent many years working for security vendors, we’d grown jaded by the industry.

On paper, security is the best sector in software. If you’re doing your job well, you do genuine good for the world. It’s full of wonderful people and fascinating technical problems.

But like many others, we developed a love-hate relationship with the industry.

The problems are well documented. Snake oil products that promise the world but fail to deliver. UX that makes you want to scream. Marketing designed to confuse rather than inform. Salespeople who treat you like a fool. 

Not all vendors are guilty, but the pattern is clear. Security companies don’t respect their customers enough.

The industry has to do better, and not just because customers deserve it. AI is clearly making it cheaper and easier to carry out cyberattacks, and the pace of progress shows no sign of slowing down. For now, AI is helping attackers more than defenders. That needs to change.

So, in 2024, we decided to start a security company after all. We saw that AI was going to make things a lot more difficult for defenders. We knew that vulnerabilities in code and cloud, a problem we’d faced ourselves when leading engineering teams, were spiraling out of control, just as AI was driving rapid growth in the amount of software being built.

We realized there’s so much we love about the industry, and that by starting our own company, we could do things our own way.

We also saw that, counterintuitively, AI was going to make building great security products harder, not easier. Fully realizing the potential of AI in security would require completely rethinking what the underlying technology stack of a security product should be.

So we set out to build Maze as a security company that thinks differently, based on the following principles:

1. Treat customers with respect. Every company says they are customer-centric. Few act like it. For us, it shows up in the small things: UX we’ve obsessed over, marketing that talks to you like an adult, and a sales process that isn’t trying to trap you.
2. Be relentlessly product and engineering-focused. Our priority is to build a product people love, and technology that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible. 
3. Don’t follow the status quo. We think for ourselves and are happier taking big risks that might not come off, rather than following tired old playbooks or copying others.
4. Take our work seriously, but don’t take ourselves too seriously. Security is hard, we look to lighten things up where we can.
5. Do the right thing when nobody is looking. We live by the mantra of “if everyone knew we’d made this decision, what would they think?”

We don’t expect to get all of this right, and we know we’re not the only ones trying. But we started Maze to build something we could be proud of. Proud of the product we build, the impact we have, and the way we treat people. You’ll have to be the judge of how we do.