Devika Creator Launches Asterisk, YC-backed AI Agent Startup

Mufeed VH, the creator of the AI software engineer Devika, has launched its AI tool and startup, Asterisk, along with Vivek R and Asjid Kalam.

Asterisk, a Y Combinator S24-backed AI agent, is revolutionising cybersecurity by automatically detecting and patching security vulnerabilities in codebases. Unlike traditional static security tools, which produce nearly 95% false positives and miss critical business logic errors, Asterisk offers a groundbreaking solution.

The AI agent mimics the analysis process of human security experts, identifying vulnerabilities such as unauthorised access, privilege escalation, and cost-inflating bugs. Asterisk operates autonomously, testing vulnerabilities in a sandbox environment and producing reports without any user intervention, ensuring zero false positives.

Asterisk confirms vulnerabilities by launching a sandbox environment, running the scanned software, and actively attempting to exploit the identified bugs. When Asterisk flags a vulnerability, it's a confirmed threat.

The team has played a key role in securing major companies, including Google, Mastercard, Okta, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.

Asterisk possesses also a deep understanding of a company’s codebase, enabling it to simulate attacks like a malicious hacker would. This allows it to devise attack scenarios, similar to what was seen in the recent CrowdStrike incident.

Mufeed was earlier the founder of Lyminal and Stition.AI, which is now known as Asterisk, where the team was researching on security within AI models. He was also the gold medalist at the IndiaSkills 2021 Nationals in cybersecurity when he was just 19 years old. 

Kalam is Silver medalist at IndiaSkills and former Security Research Engineer at Emirates National Bank (UAE). Vivek is former Distributed Systems/Platforms Engineer at Chorus One, one of the largest Proof-of-Stake (POS) validators.