Edward Wu

Edward Wu is the founder and CEO of Dropzone AI, a company in Seattle, Washington, that builds AI analysts to investigate security alerts the way a human analyst would. He started it after eight years building detection products at ExtraHop.

Networks as a source of security data

“My journey into cyber defense began with my fascination with networks as a rich source of security data,” he wrote in a post on Dropzone's mission. He left a computer science PhD at the University of Washington, where he worked on program analysis and software defenses, to join ExtraHop. There he led its AI and machine learning detection work from scratch and the move from network performance monitoring into network detection and response.

A stopwatch and an alert

The idea for Dropzone came from a feedback session with Michael, a security operations manager at a financial services customer, who walked through one ExtraHop alert across several tools while a stopwatch ran. When it passed fifteen minutes, Wu recalls, Michael told him: “Surfacing an alert doesn't change the game. You need to help me understand them.”

Wu came to see that security teams, for all their detection tools, often investigated fewer than 10% of their alerts. Detection had been automated while investigation stayed manual, and Dropzone is built to close that gap.