This Pune woman is at the forefront of cybersec

Priyanka Tembey, CTO and cofounder of US-based cybersecurity venture Operant AI, credits her competitive drive to the spirited rivalry between her school and a neighbouring one when growing up in Pune.Following her Bachelor’s in computer science from Cummins College of Engineering for Women in Pune, she faced two paths – joining IBM in Bengaluru or continuing her education. Her family valued academic excellence – her father had graduated from IIT, and her mother was a tutor. The books she referred to as an undergraduate had been authored by professors in top US schools. That exposure made her want to dig deeper – especially into operating systems and distributed systems.

And with that desire to learn, she chose to do a Master’s at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, US. And later followed it up with a PhD from the same institute.The US stint wasn’t easy at first. Atlanta didn’t feel as safe as Pune, though inside the Georgia Tech campus, it was much better, quite like her undergrad campus. The first semester was tense, because she had come without a scholarship. “But eventually, when I started working on a Master’s thesis with professor Ada Gavrilovska, she offered me research funding, which later transitioned into my PhD funding as well,” says Priyanka.

Her first job was at Qualcomm Research, where she worked on early machine learning applications for identifying malicious apps on Android. A little over a year later, she joined VMware. And that, she says, was a turning point in her career. She was part of the founding engineering team that built from scratch the VMware Cloud Foundation. It was an experience that taught her about zero-to-one journeys. A stint at Juniper Networks followed.When her green card came through, she had more flexibility and fewer constraints. Being in Silicon Valley, she could feel the startup energy and decided she needed to do something of her own.With a former colleague at Qualcomm, Vrajesh Bhavsar, and a former Google ads strategist, Ashley Roof, she founded Operant AI – a venture at the intersection of security and AI, an area she was familiar with from her Qualcomm days.Priyanka says Operant’s USP is simple: Provide real-time, dynamic security by detecting and blocking threats during application runtime, unlike traditional security tools that rely on static rules and scanning. “It is specifically designed to protect modern cloud and AI environments where threats evolve rapidly and conventional security measures fall short,” she says.In a crowded cybersecurity space, Operant AI gained traction quickly.

In September last year, Operant AI raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by venture capital firms SineWave Ventures and Felicis.Currently, Priyanka is juggling two toddlers, her son and Operant AI. Both, she says, throw tantrums. “I had my son around the same time we raised our first seed round. I try to compartmentalise, work while he’s in school, be fully present with him when he’s home, and log back in after his bedtime. It’s not perfect, but that structure helps keep things manageable.”