- Two of Snap's most senior executives have teamed up to form a new security startup called TerraTrue.
- TerraTrue CEO Jad Boutros was formerly chief security officer at Snap and left in January 2018.
- Cofounder Chris Handman was general counsel at Snap until the summer of 2017.
- TerraTrue is based in San Francisco and wants to make it easier to bake security and privacy into product development.
Two former Snap executives have joined forces on a new security startup called TerraTrue.
TerraTrue's chief executive officer, Jad Boutros, was Snap's chief security officer until January 2018. Chris Handman, his cofounder, was Snap's general counsel until the middle of 2017.
TerraTrue is based in San Francisco and has been going since December 2018, according to Boutros' LinkedIn profile. It is just making its first engineering hires, and the startup's goal is to make it easier for fast-growing companies to bake security and privacy into their product development process.
Boutros told Business Insider via email: "We want to make it easier for companies to enhance data security and privacy in everything they do, without causing undue friction or slowing down the pace of innovation.
"That’s important because, with GDPR and a host of new regulatory pressures — to say nothing of public outcry over lax security and privacy practices — companies are looking for ways to promote security and privacy."
TerraTrue is working on its first product, "Launch Approval," which will help different teams review new or upcoming launches and raise any security or privacy concerns early in the process.
Boutros added: "Our aspiration long-term runs much deeper than this initial product, but we believe that this is an important foundational tool that does not exist in the market and is a great first step toward democratizing security and privacy for all companies, big and small."
The company is self-funded so far, Boutros said.
Both Boutros and Handman have impressive security credentials. Boutros was responsible for building anti-spam and anti-abuse tools into Snapchat, and worked at Google in information security prior to that. Handman, according to TerraTrue's site, was deeply involved with user privacy at Snap.
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