Crosslayer Labs

Protect, monitor and defend your Internet presence

Winter 2026ActiveB2BSecuritySaaSB2BCybersecuritySan Francisco, CA, USA

Company

https://www.crosslayerlabs.com

Crosslayer Labs detects impersonation attacks on websites and APIs. We provide "outside-in" monitoring of customer infrastructure, comprehensively discovering and monitoring all Internet dependencies, including DNS, BGP, TLS certs, Javascript. We correlate signals from different layers of the Internet stack to identify attack patterns. Our alerts are actionable and contain root cause analysis/remediation recommendations. Our founding team is world renowned for previously inventing the MPIC standard adopted by all the major CAs including Google, Apple, Amazon. The MPIC standard is securing over 700 million websites via the issuance of over 3 billion digital certificates, and is now a global internet standard that protects every single HTTPS connection.

Verdict

High Signal

Market Opportunity

Internet infrastructure security (DNS hijacking, BGP attacks, certificate misissuance, API impersonation) is a multi-billion dollar market. ICP is clear: any enterprise with significant web/API surface area — financial services, healthcare, e-commerce, cloud providers. The problem is real, growing, and enterprises pay significant premiums for infrastructure monitoring and threat detection tools. Monetization via SaaS subscription is straightforward.

High Signal

Founder Signal

Exceptionally credentialed technical team. Henry Birge-Lee invented MPIC (Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration), now adopted by all major CAs including Google, Apple, Amazon, securing 700M+ websites and 3B+ certificates — this is a genuine, verifiable global internet standard. Prateek Mittal is a Princeton professor with published work on HTTPS security and LLM security (OpenAI GPT 3.5/4V). Grace Cimaszewski is a Princeton PhD who worked directly with CA/Browser Forum to turn research into ecosystem standards, plus visiting researcher stints at Google and Corelight Labs. This is among the most credentialed founding teams possible for this specific domain.

Medium Signal

Competition

Competitors likely include Cloudflare (BGP/DNS monitoring), Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike (external attack surface management), and specialist EASM players like Censys, Netlas, and SecurityTrails. The differentiation here is the multi-layer correlation approach (DNS+BGP+TLS+JS together) and the founders' unique provenance inside the CA/Browser Forum standards process, giving them proprietary insight into how the certificate ecosystem actually works. No direct competitor data was returned, but this space has established players.

Medium Signal

Product

The product concept is well-defined — outside-in monitoring of DNS, BGP, TLS, Javascript layers to detect impersonation attacks with root cause analysis. However, no named customers, no revenue metrics, no live demo or pricing page are visible. The technical depth of the description suggests a real product is in progress, but it reads more like a research prototype than a commercially proven solution.

OverallA Tier

The founding team is genuinely world-class for this problem — inventing a global internet standard that protects every HTTPS connection is an extraordinarily rare credential, not marketing fluff. The technical moat is real: these founders have deeper knowledge of certificate infrastructure and internet stack attacks than virtually any competitor. The core weakness is that no product traction or customer evidence is visible yet, which keeps this from S-tier. The risk is classic 'brilliant researchers building for researchers' — they need to translate deep technical insight into actionable enterprise sales, which is a different muscle. If they can ship a polished product and close even a handful of paying enterprise customers, this becomes very compelling.

Active Founders

Henry Birge-Lee

Founder

I am am innovator in web and network security. I invented Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration (MPIC) which now secures every single HTTPS connection. I am currently focusing on building the Crosslayer Labs platform for web resource integrity.

Grace Cimaszewski

Founder

I'm a soon-graduating PhD student at Princeton. I've worked with the CA/Browser Forum to turn my research on TLS certificate security into ecosystem-wide requirements which now improve the security of every HTTPS connection you view in your browser. Before starting Crosslayer with my long-time research collaborators, I was a visiting research at Google and Corelight Labs.

Prateek Mittal

Founder

I am a professor at Princeton University and co-founder of Crosslayer Labs (YC W26). I'm broadly interested in cybersecurity and privacy. My research has helped secure every single web connection (HTTPS) worldwide and enhanced the security of deployed LLMs (e.g., GPT 3.5 and GPT4V at OpenAI).

Crosslayer Labs

TierA Tier

BatchWinter 2026

Team Size3

StatusActive

LocationSan Francisco, CA, USA