The team behind Arkion.
Operators from regulated cybersecurity, now building the governance layer the machine estate never had. Authors of the NHIG Standard. Founded 2025.
We built Arkion because every enterprise we worked with had the same blind spot.
Human identity — employees, contractors, customers — has been governed for twenty years. Non-human identity — the agents, certificates, and machines that outnumber humans 80-to-1 — has not. IAM was built for the wrong population.
We started Arkion to write that governance layer, and to author the Standard the industry does not yet have. Every line of product and every line of the NHIG Standard is our answer to a question we lived before we started the company: who, exactly, is accountable for the machine?
— Manoj Arora & Faisal Razzak
Manoj Arora
Co-Founder & CEO
Manoj is Co-Founder and CEO of Arkion. He brings two decades of building and scaling cybersecurity businesses, with deep operating experience across managed defense, identity, and enterprise risk. He is the founder of Difenda — the Microsoft-based cybersecurity practice that built the Cyber Command Center to defend regulated enterprises at machine speed.
Arkion is the governance layer he concluded did not exist. Human IAM was built for employees; nothing was built for the agents, certificates, and services now doing most of the authenticated work. Manoj leads the company, the go-to-market, and the conviction that non-human identity requires its own standard.
- DifendaFounder & CEOFounded and scaled Difenda into a leading Microsoft-based cybersecurity practice, operating the Cyber Command Center to defend regulated enterprises at machine speed.
Faisal Razzak
Co-Founder & Chief Product & Technology Officer
Faisal is Co-Founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer of Arkion. He brings sixteen years of building and scaling cybersecurity products, with deep expertise in cryptography, AI-agent identity management, and post-quantum cryptography. He holds a PhD in Computer and Information Systems.
His career has been the arc of turning hard cryptographic ideas into category-defining platforms — concept to product-market fit, repeatedly. At Arkion, he leads product, engineering, and the authorship of the NHIG Standard: the document that names the primitives, principles, and maturity model for governing the machine estate.
- Cybersecurity Product Leadership16+ years · concept → PMFTook hard cryptographic ideas from research into category-defining platforms — leading teams from concept to product-market fit, repeatedly.
- Academic ResearchPhD · Computer & Information SystemsDeep expertise in cryptography, AI-agent identity management, and post-quantum cryptography.