Spherical Defense was founded in 2017 by Dishant Shah and Jack Hopkins with a vision to become the world’s best cyber-security company, starting by building a product to protect against attacks on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Dishant had uncovered major vulnerabilities in banks’ IT systems during his MSc in Information Security at University College London, while Jack was attempting to teach computers to learn poetry as part of his masters in computational linguistics at Cambridge.

The two met at met in September 2016 at an entrepreneurship summit in London, and started working on a tool that could apply deep learning techniques to define normal API traffic, flagging hacks as deviations from the baseline. Spherical Defense was founded, and the company was quickly selected by GCHQ to join its prestigious Accelerator Programme.