Silmaril opens conversations with security leaders at Vercel, Solana and Rivian

Understanding the Problem

With $6.1 million raised and backing from Greylock Partners and Y Combinator, Silmaril is building for a defining challenge in enterprise AI: securing AI agents. Founded by Aum Upadhyay and Eduardo Velasco, the company brings its AI-agent security proposition to the CISOs, security engineers and technical leaders responsible for protecting organisations as they adopt this technology. Its ambition puts it at the centre of conversations about how enterprises can move forward with AI securely.

For a technical security company, access to the right people is an essential part of bringing the product to market. Silmaril needed a repeatable way to introduce its AI-agent security proposition to CISOs, security engineers and technical decision-makers, then turn relevant interest into conversations with the founding team.

The programme had two complementary routes to that audience: direct product outreach and carefully targeted invitations to small security events. Each required its own audience, message and follow-up. Senior security buyers, technical champions and practitioner peers needed a reason to engage that reflected their responsibilities and location.

Opening doors to security leaders

Nouvel built and operated the outbound programme across dedicated product and event campaigns. The work covered contact research, audience preparation, segmented messages, sending infrastructure and coordinated follow-up on behalf of Aum Upadhyay, Eduardo Velasco and the wider team.

For the San Francisco gathering, outreach was organised into executive security buyers, security-function leaders, senior technical champions and practitioner peers. For the Austin private omakase dinner, a separate geographic audience and invitation sequence supported the event. This kept the purpose of each conversation clear while giving Silmaril several ways to reach the same strategic market.

Nouvel managed the operating work behind those campaigns, giving the founders an organised stream of replies and opportunities to develop. Product interest, event requests and potential partnership conversations could be handled with their original context intact.

“Nouvel gave us a speed advantage. They took ownership of our entire outbound operation. This helped us gain a tempo over our competitors.”

Aum Upadhyay

Co-founder & CEO, Silmaril

“Nouvel gave us a speed advantage. They took ownership of our entire outbound operation. This helped us gain a tempo over our competitors.”

Aum Upadhyay

Co-founder & CEO, Silmaril

Outcome

Nouvel created 28 opportunities for Silmaril across product, event and partnership conversations. These included direct interest in meeting the team and requests to stay connected for future events, with each contact counted once. Silmaril achieved 12.6× faster coverage of its target market, giving the founders more opportunities to build relationships with relevant security leaders.

The event campaigns generated sign-ups from contacts at Vercel, Solana Foundation, Verkada and Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies. In Austin, an AppOmni partnerships leader asked to join the private dinner and raised a possible alliance, also identifying a potential fit with a CISO at BambooHR. These were concrete openings for the founding team to pursue.

The outreach also opened ongoing relationships with contacts at Notion, Plaid, Iterable and Lucidworks, who asked to receive future invitations. A Google security partnerships leader expressed interest in connecting another time. Those replies gave Silmaril a clear reason to continue the conversation beyond the initial event.

For Silmaril, the value was a managed route into a specialised audience: researched prospects, relevant invitations and direct conversations with people close to the security problems its product addresses. Nouvel handled the outbound operation so the founders could spend their time on those conversations.