Simon Harloff
Co-founder & CPTO at Dam Secure
Simon Harloff is co-founder and chief product and technology officer of Dam Secure, a Sydney AI-security startup he founded with former Zip Payments colleague Patrick Collins. The company builds an AI-native platform that lets organisations set security guardrails, in plain English, for code generated by AI coding tools. Before Dam Secure, Harloff led product security teams at Zip Payments and Secure Code Warrior. Dam Secure raised US$4 million (A$6.1 million) in seed funding led by Paladin Capital Group in early 2026. On Secured by Galah Cyber, he discussed how the platform puts guardrails on AI-generated code.
Career
- Now Co-founder & CPTO · Dam Secure
- Earlier · Scale-up Director of Product Management, AI · Secure Code Warrior
- 2020–2022 · Scale-up Senior Product Manager, Product Security · Zip Co (Zip Payments)
Sources: forbes.com.au
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of How Dam Secure Puts Guardrails on AI Generated Code you want.
- 1:01 Chainguard ad
- 1:28 Meet Patrick Collins and Simon Harloff from Dam Secure
- 3:00 Why existing AppSec tooling never worked for developers
- 5:30 The artisanal vs factory model of software development
- 8:30 Hacker News, polarisation and the AI sentiment shift
- 11:00 Agile, standups and processes that no longer make sense
- 14:00 Bigger PRs, higher velocity and workflows without an IDE
- 17:00 Skills, agents.md and the limits of deterministic guardrails
- 20:00 The AppSec to developer ratio problem
- 23:00 The SaaSpocalypse and why rebuilding tools is a side quest
Connections
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
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