Ahmed Achchak

Ahmed Achchak is co-founder and CEO of Qevlar AI, a company in Paris, France, that builds an autonomous platform for investigating security alerts, used by security teams and managed security providers. He founded it in 2023 with Hamza Sayah, its chief technology officer.

Neighbours, then a hackathon

Achchak and Sayah met in 2015 as coursemates and neighbours in student housing. “His room was exactly next to mine,” Sayah told EQT Ventures. In 2018 they teamed up at a Huawei hackathon in Paris to design an AI tool that spotted anomalies in cloud logs, and won first prize. “We did pretty well at the hackathon,” Achchak said. Achchak studied biotechnology and mathematics at CentraleSupélec, worked on machine learning at banks and startups, and was chief technology officer of Minautor.

Learning from security teams

Qevlar started with conversations with people working in security operations centers. “People were flooded by alerts to the point that they would get burned out,” Achchak said. “That’s not sustainable, and something we definitely wanted to solve.” Because neither founder came from security, he treats that feedback as a discipline: “We’re not from the field ourselves, so we have to be very disciplined about this feedback loop that we have.”