Zainab Ali Majid

Zainab Ali Majid is a British-Pakistani cybersecurity researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded Asymmetric Security, the AI-native digital forensics and incident response company tackling the surge in AI-driven cyberattacks. Her background is distinctively cross-disciplinary, combining rigorous academic training in physics with deep practical expertise in cybersecurity and a growing body of work in AI safety research.

Majid studied Physics at the University of Oxford for both her undergraduate and master’s degrees, developing the analytical and mathematical grounding that would later define her approach to forensic investigation. After Oxford, she joined Stroz Friedberg, one of the world’s leading cybersecurity consultancies, where she spent more than five years as a senior cybersecurity analyst investigating some of the most high-profile digital breaches of the past decade, including work related to the Cambridge Analytica case. During this time she developed particular expertise in large-scale network forensics and digital investigations for Fortune 500 companies.

In parallel, she became deeply engaged with the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, publishing two papers at NeurIPS — the world’s most prestigious machine learning conference — within six months of entering the AI research space, and contributing to AI safety research at Apart Research. Her rare combination of operational security experience and academic AI credibility became central to the founding proposition of Asymmetric Security.

Co-founded in 2025 with Alexis Carlier and Pippa Thompson through Entrepreneur First, Asymmetric Security raised £3 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round in January 2026, led by Susa Ventures. The company’s platform uses AI to compress incident response timelines from days to hours, with plans to extend into insider threats, ransomware, and nation-state incidents.