Gianni Valerio | Co-Founder and CEO | Colchix
Gianni Valerio, Co-Founder and CEO of Colchix, is an Italian technology entrepreneur focused on helping organisations navigate the growing relationship between artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. His journey into cybersecurity came through his experience in the technology industry and his growing awareness of how quickly generative AI was becoming part of everyday work. Before founding Colchix, Valerio built his career in commercial roles across technology companies, including Salesforce. These experiences gave him a strong understanding of how businesses adopt new technologies and how employees interact with them in real working environments.
The rise of tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini made Valerio recognise a new challenge. Employees were adopting AI to become more productive, but many did not always understand what information could safely be shared with these platforms. He also recognised these behaviours from his own experience as an employee. This created an important question for organisations: how can they benefit from AI without losing control over their data and security? For Valerio, this gap between rapid adoption and effective governance became the foundation for Colchix.
“Security must understand the business, not simply block it.”
His approach to cybersecurity is built around a simple principle: organisations should not block AI, but govern it. He believes businesses cannot afford to ignore AI because of the productivity, innovation, and competitive advantages it offers. At the same time, uncontrolled AI usage can create new risks. Personal AI accounts, unauthorised tools, and sensitive information being copied into external systems can create an internal risk surface that traditional security strategies may not fully address.
As Co-Founder and CEO of Colchix, Valerio works across partnerships, go-to-market strategy, product positioning, and market education. Since AI governance is still an emerging category, much of his role involves helping organisations understand risks that may not yet be visible to them. Rather than waiting for a security incident, regulatory issue, or data exposure to force action, he encourages companies to identify their weaknesses early and build appropriate controls around them.
For Valerio, visibility is one of the most important foundations of modern cybersecurity. Employees are usually not trying to expose company information deliberately. They are often simply trying to complete their work faster and more efficiently. However, when employees use AI tools without organisational oversight, companies can lose sight of where information is going. This is why he believes that organisations cannot effectively govern what they cannot see.
Colchix addresses this challenge by helping organisations discover their actual AI usage, identify Shadow AI, understand potential sensitive-data exposure, and create governance evidence around how AI is being used. Beyond visibility, Colchix is also developing runtime controls to protect sensitive information before it reaches external AI systems, a capability being built collaboratively by Gianni Valerio and his co-founder and CTO, Gabriele Salvo. The objective is not simply to prevent employees from using AI. Instead, the company aims to help organisations understand their real exposure and create security practices that match the way people actually work.
Valerio also sees AI as more than a source of cybersecurity risk. He believes the same technology creating new challenges can become an important security enabler. AI can support organisations by detecting unusual behaviour, classifying information, automating security controls, and continuously assessing risk. When used correctly, these capabilities can help security teams respond faster and make better decisions.
“The first step in security is finding the blind spots.”
Building a strong cybersecurity culture is another important part of Valerio’s philosophy. He believes organisations should practise the same principles internally that they recommend to their customers. For Colchix, this means understanding exposure, challenging assumptions, and making security part of everyday work rather than treating it as an annual compliance exercise. This approach encourages employees to see security as a shared responsibility.
Among his proudest achievements is building Colchix itself. For Valerio, one of the most meaningful outcomes is seeing organisations begin to ask questions they may not have considered before. Do they know which AI tools their employees are using? Are they certain that sensitive information is being protected? These questions can reveal blind spots and create the awareness required to improve security.
Valerio stays connected to the changing cybersecurity landscape through industry events, conversations with cybersecurity and governance professionals, and direct discussions with organisations. He believes understanding how companies actually work is more valuable than designing solutions in isolation. These conversations also help Colchix develop solutions that address the needs of specific sectors rather than treating every organisation in the same way.
He considers continuous learning, curiosity, and openness to innovation essential qualities for cybersecurity professionals. He also believes there is significant value in collaboration between established security teams and younger technology companies. Startups can often experiment with emerging technologies and problems at an early stage, while established organisations bring experience and a deeper understanding of enterprise security requirements.
For Valerio, balancing security with business needs is critical. Security teams cannot always respond to new technology by simply saying no. Businesses adopt AI because it creates value, so the better approach is to understand the workflow, the data involved, and the associated risks before designing appropriate security measures.
Looking ahead, Valerio believes AI will be one of the defining forces shaping cybersecurity. It will increase the speed and scale of both cyber threats and defensive capabilities. As a result, education and responsible adoption will become increasingly important alongside technological innovation.
He sees Europe as being in a strong position to shape the future of responsible AI governance. Europe’s ambitious regulatory environment creates complexity for organisations, but it also creates an opportunity to establish strong standards around security, privacy, and trust. Valerio believes greater cooperation between enterprises, regulators, technology providers, and startups will be essential.
“Move at AI speed, safely.”
Through Colchix, his vision is to help European organisations benefit from global AI capabilities while maintaining visibility, control, and trust. For Valerio, the future of cybersecurity is not about preventing organisations from using new technology. It is about giving them the knowledge and governance needed to use it safely, responsibly, and confidently.