Home / Founders / Dean Valentine
Valentine sold his trading-data startup MEVlink to bloXroute in 2023 and now runs ZeroPath, whose AI scanner has found bugs in curl and other widely used open-source projects.
Dean Valentine is co-founder and CEO of ZeroPath, a San Francisco, California, company whose AI scanner looks for logic bugs, broken authentication and risky dependencies in code, checks which ones can be exploited, and proposes patches.
Selling MEVlink to bloXroute
Before ZeroPath he co-founded MEVlink, a crypto infrastructure startup that streamed fast mempool data to traders. In May 2023 bloXroute Labs acquired MEVlink and brought its co-founders onto its engineering teams. His MEVlink co-founder Etienne Lunetta later joined him again as ZeroPath's COO.
Starting ZeroPath at Y Combinator
He started ZeroPath in 2024 with Lunetta, Raphael Karger and Nathan Hrncirik, and the company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, according to its Y Combinator profile. The team set out to find the kinds of flaws a skilled human reviewer catches, such as missing permission checks, which pattern-matching scanners often miss.
Finding Bugs in curl
ZeroPath's scans of open-source code drew notice when its findings led to bug fixes in curl, the widely used data-transfer tool. The company says more than 150 curl bugs have been fixed from its reports. In 2026 ZeroPath was named a top 10 finalist in the RSAC Innovation Sandbox contest, according to ZeroPath.
