Building Overwatch: AI Agents for Threat Intelligence at Attacker Speed

Arjun Bisen, Co-Founder and CEO of Overwatch Data, sits down with Phill Keaney-Bolland on the Cult Products Podcast to talk about the origin of Overwatch, what it takes to earn enterprise trust, and the human realities of building a company for the long haul.

Every founder looks for the moment when the work finally clicks. For Arjun Bisen, that moment had a name: BERT.

"That was one of those moments for me," Arjun recalls. "BERT was a tiny model compared to GPT. But that's really when I was like, 'Okay, if we had an army of Google Assistants with BERT, we could do a lot of amazing cybersecurity automation.'"

It wasn't a random insight. It came from years spent watching how risk and intelligence work actually gets done inside government, Google, and Stripe, and seeing up close how manual and fragmented those systems still were. Security teams buried in noise. Fraud analysts working from stale data. A market full of vendors making promises they couldn't keep. Overwatch was built to change that: AI agents that monitor cyber and fraud threats at the speed attackers operate, not the speed analysts can keep up with.

From Diplomacy to Defense Tech

Arjun's path to founding Overwatch isn't a typical Silicon Valley story. Before Stripe and Google, he worked in diplomacy and global security, a background that turned out to be formative for building a threat intelligence company. That experience shaped how Overwatch thinks about risk: not as a compliance exercise, but as something that lives in adversarial, constantly shifting environments where the rules change faster than most organizations can track.

It also shaped how Arjun thinks about sales. Regulated markets and enterprise security buyers don't care about polished decks. They want proof. "There were certain types of customers that were inclined to pick the dream instead of the status quo," he says, "and as a startup you kind of have to know which ones are that and lean into them."

Why Y Combinator Mattered

For Arjun, Y Combinator wasn't just a check. It was the reason Overwatch got off the ground at all.

"I wouldn't have founded a startup had it not been for YC. So I'm definitely one of those people that YC gave me the vehicle through which to embark on this journey through multiple fronts."

In enterprise security, credibility is currency. The YC stamp opened doors that would otherwise have taken years to crack and made recruiting possible before the company had much else to show. "You can spend years just trying to find someone to believe in your idea and fundraise. And so with YC, you get a check out of the gate and you get the logo, and it means you can recruit people and start actually building."

Selling Honestly in a Market Burned by Hype

Cybersecurity has a trust problem. Vendors overpromise, buyers get burned, and every new sales conversation starts with skepticism already baked in. Overwatch's answer was to go the other direction: lead with proof of value, find the use cases that repeat, and show the work before asking for anything in return.

It sounds simple, but in a market where everyone claims to be AI-native and fully autonomous, honesty turns out to be a real differentiator. The customers worth winning, Arjun found, are the ones willing to build with you rather than just evaluate you.

The Human Side of Building

Some of the most valuable parts of the conversation have nothing to do with product or go-to-market strategy. Arjun is unusually candid about what the journey actually feels like from the inside.

"The ratio flips from maybe ten percent of your requests being declined to ninety-nine percent of your requests being declined, and that psychological impact is probably what kills a lot of founders rather than the process."

Staying alive, not just keeping the company alive, turns out to be one of the core disciplines of early-stage building. "A lot of this journey is staying alive on all fronts, like your personal life, your staff, your co-founders, and the people you love."

And then there's community. Not the performative kind, but the kind built through years of showing up and giving before you need anything back. "You need a community, and a community isn't all one way. You have to give a lot to have a community."

If Arjun could tell his earlier self one thing, it would be this: "Be more patient and discerning with who you work with, because this is a very long journey."

What You'll Hear in the Full Episode

• How Overwatch's AI agents automate work across cyber and fraud threat intelligence
• What the BERT moment looked like and why it pointed toward cybersecurity
• How to build product roadmaps when the underlying technology shifts every quarter
• What a practical definition of product-market fit looks like for enterprise startups
• The founder mindset required to navigate years of rejection and keep building anyway

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.