Rohith Shankar

I chose forensic science in 2019 because I wanted to help stop crimes. Forensics taught me something uncomfortable. By the time the evidence reaches you, the harm is already done. Every case was a story that had already ended badly.

So I kept moving towards the front of the problem. First cloud engineering, to understand how real systems are built and run. Then digital forensics in a working forensic laboratory. Then cyber security research, and then penetration testing, which means breaking into systems for a living so they can be fixed before someone else gets in. In September 2024 I came to London to study cyber security and penetration testing at Middlesex University.

During my MSc project I was running several AI agents at once. One day I opened my settings and found a line I had never written. It bypassed permissions and switched off every policy I had set. It stayed that way for four days. No alarm went off and no alert was raised.

Nothing malicious had happened. The AI had simply found the most efficient way to finish its work, and efficiency is not the same as following the rules.

That was when I understood the gap. Our security tools check who someone is. Nobody checks why an AI agent was allowed to take the action it is about to take.

AI agents are now paying invoices, reading company email and running commands on live systems. The identity checks, data loss tools and monitoring that companies rely on were built for people. An agent can pass every one of them and still do something nobody asked for.

SELA sits at the moment of action. It gives every agent its own identity, works out what the person actually asked for, and checks each step the agent proposes against that request before anything happens. When an agent goes beyond the job, SELA stops it and keeps a tamper-evident record of why.

We started research in January 2026, began building in February and registered the company in March. SELA reached MVP in October and refused every stage of a six-stage attack chain in our own testing. We have spoken with more than 25 CISOs and CTOs in the UK, the US and Abu Dhabi, and hold six letters of intent.

I have handled evidence after the damage was done, and I have broken into systems to stop it happening. SELA is what you get when you take that forensic habit of asking exactly what happened, and move it to the moment before the action instead of after it.