This article discusses why AxisNow exists and what it aims to do.

Before we dive in, let me share a bit of my backstory.

More than ten years ago, China was filled with entrepreneurial spirit. I was fortunate enough to be part of this journey, riding the wave of the booming internet development in China.

In the beginning, we didn't think too far ahead. We simply found something we loved that allowed us to earn a living for ourselves and our families. We didn't have much social experience or a systematic knowledge structure in place, not to mention any idea how to run a company, lead a team, or scientifically develop a product. Looking back, it's very lucky that we've made it this far.

Reflecting on this, I believe our survival can be attributed to being in an industry with growing dividends, and our dedication to our product. We strived to learn from companies excellent than us, such as Cloudflare, a product and technology-oriented, highly creative organization that I have always admired.

In 2019, we were fortunate to be acquired by an excellent company aiming to be China's Cloudflare. We made efforts to integrate security and CDN, expanded employee-oriented zero-trust products, and experienced team reorganization and IPO. I am grateful for these experiences and the opportunities Baishan has given us.

In 2023, after undergoing these significant life changes, I once again pondered deeper questions - What do I really want? After much consideration, I decided to set off again - there's a vast world out there, and I wanted to see it.

How could you form a worldview without experiencing the world? After arriving in Singapore, the different landscape and environment expanded my worldview. Competing with the world's top companies and excellent talents, I suddenly felt small. There is much that I lack and much more I need to learn, but it excites me. Even if I fail, this is a worthy life adventure because when I interact and compete with better people, I too become better.

So, unlike most startups worldwide, we are not born out of a specific problem. Instead, we are born from our life choices and value orientation.

To summarize, that is the driving force behind AxisNow.

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Now, let's address what AxisNow aims to do.

At first, to be honest, I was quite confused. I hadn't clearly defined what AxisNow was set out to accomplish, further complicated by language barriers, as I am still improving my English skills. However, I believe these to be temporary hurdles. I steadfastly believe that we can find our place in this broad world, guided by an obscure and immature idea in my mind.

Using the hammer and nail approach, I brainstormed all possible directions we could take based on our core capabilities. I need a rough direction to guide me and my team, and gradually explore and focus on what we can accomplish during this process.

From a macro perspective, I thought about the three major types of products in the cybersecurity field：traffic-based products (such as Firewalls, Micro-isolation, SSE, and SASE) and non-traffic-based products (such as CSPM, XDR, SOC, and IAM) , and endpoints. If we had to choose among these categories, we excel in gateway technology stack related to traffic.

Further, surrounding the gateway technology stack, we have listed potential domains and concluded three types of traffic: IDless, Human Id, and Non-human Id.

Next, we ideated a macro architecture, imagining a platform that encapsulates "All-in-One," "Any to Any," "Any L3-L7 Traffic." It would serve the above three use cases. We began to describe this vision and architecture to those around us, hoping to gain their endorsement. However, like most startups, many were skeptical and thought it sounded too far-fetched.

We started to question ourselves. Perhaps we were still clinging to the idea of Cloudflare, or maybe we were still too immature concerning business and startups. Maybe we hadn't indeed clarified what we wanted to do.

Throughout this process, I'm thankful for the company of ICE71 (especially Rayson), the unwavering trust from my co-founder James, the support from BaiShan Cloud partners. I appreciate the advice from Agora's Bin and Rogen, and the support and encouragement from our first Israeli friend, Raz. Moreover, I am grateful for our seed clients, partners, industry experts, and our families who supported and trusted us.

Having grand ambitions is fine, but we need to start with the most salient, most exciting aspect.

We began contemplating this question. Among so many viable areas and dependent core competencies, what should we give up and what should we choose? What's our optimal development path? If I had a personal AI, capable of synthesizing all information, I believe it could guide me towards the decision with the best chance of success.

Yet for now, we can only rely on ourselves, meaning we need to establish some decision-making principles and selection criteria:

• Something you deeply love and are willing to pay the price for.

• A market space where it seems we can compete and offer unique value.

• Being time-friendly, meaning it enables sustainable development of core competencies over time.

Based on the above principles, we continued exploring and found that the rapidly increasing Non-human IDs are becoming new attack vectors. At the same time, the future of AI will create entirely new ingress and egress. This represents a massive opportunity in the AI era with only a handful of emerging startups in this domain. What's more exciting is that, on the other side of the ocean, there's a much more accomplished predecessor using the same tech stack to forge and lead an entirely new market, and we have a somewhat similar background.

However, this gave rise to another problem: How can we differentiate ourselves? With this question and fraught with tension (as we were consuming and overdrawing their trust and support), we further communicated with potential customers and industry experts. We discovered that, by focusing on NHI, ingress and egress, we could help businesses massively increase productivity and reshape non-human access.

We definition this the Non-Human Identity & Access Edge. I believe this is the "nail" we've found. That's where we'll begin.

Next, we began developing a platform. It’s like the trusted combination of Okta and Cloudflare, but focus on non-human traffic. Based on Client or Clientless.

At the same time, we believe an exceptional user experience coupled with an open platform can bring about positive impacts. With thoughtful design, we aim to minimize the cost and complexity of administrator deployment maintenance, deliver security software loved by developers, and seamlessly integrate with ecosystem partners. In addition, effective gateway-class cybersecurity products must also provide the necessary scale, performance, and reliability for production.

We are only at the beginning, an ICE71 incubated company (ICE71, headquartered in Singapore, is established by Singtel Group's venture capital arm, Singtel Innov8, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) through its entrepreneurial division, NUS Enterprise). We are still a small team of 11 people, but we have big ambitions and a mission. If you share our ethos, if you see this market opportunity, if you can help us accelerate our development, we welcome potential investors, clients, or partners to contact us and make this possible.

Eyes on the stars, and feet on the ground.

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Finally, allow me to pay my highest respects to the pioneers and founders of the industry!

• Most popular edge cloud among engineers：Cloudflare
• Workload IAM Pioneering Creator：Aembit
• Non-human identity management Pioneering Creator: Astrix

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