Elias Marquez has over a decade of experience in offensive security, including network penetration testing, web application assessments, mobile testing, physical engagements, hardware and IoT hacking, and social engineering. He founded Achilleus, a penetration testing firm, and spent years uncovering vulnerabilities that automated scanners consistently missed.
In July 2023, he built an AI-powered pentesting assistant, a knowledgeable chatbot trained on offensive security knowledge. By August 2024, Achilleus clients were requesting automated penetration testing services. When evaluating vendor solutions, what he found, repeatedly, were vulnerability scanners dressed in AI marketing clothing. They could only execute predefined scripts, lacked unified platform coverage, and carried prohibitively high licensing costs.
In September 2024, during another unsatisfactory vendor evaluation, the decision was made: "Screw this, I'll just create it myself." The vision was clear: an AI system that could genuinely reason, adapt, and execute like a skilled human pentester, not merely run predefined scripts. Development began in October 2024, with multiple systems built and discarded until the architecture was right.
The goal was never to replace human pentesters. Human intuition, creativity, and judgment are irreplaceable. The goal was to extend those capabilities, to give clients access to something that operates at a genuinely high level, continuously, and at scale. That vision became Canima.
