This article discusses why AxisNow exists and what it aims to do.

Before we dive in, let me share a bit of my backstory.

More than ten years ago, China was filled with entrepreneurial spirit. I was fortunate enough to be part of this journey, riding the wave of the booming internet development in China.

In the beginning, we didn't think too far ahead. We simply found something we loved that allowed us to earn a living for ourselves and our families. We didn't have much social experience or a systematic knowledge structure in place, not to mention any idea how to run a company, lead a team, or scientifically develop a product. Looking back, it's very lucky that we've made it this far.

Reflecting on this, I believe our survival can be attributed to being in an industry with growing dividends, and our dedication to our product. We strived to learn from companies excellent than us, such as Cloudflare, a product and technology-oriented, highly creative organization that I have always admired.

In 2019, we were fortunate to be acquired by an excellent company aiming to be China's Cloudflare. We made efforts to integrate security and CDN, expanded employee-oriented zero-trust products, and experienced team reorganization and IPO. I am grateful for these experiences and the opportunities Baishan has given us.

In 2023, after undergoing these significant life changes, I once again pondered deeper questions - What do I really want? After much consideration, I decided to set off again - there's a vast world out there, and I wanted to see it.

How could you form a worldview without experiencing the world? After arriving in Singapore, the different landscape and environment expanded my worldview. Competing with the world's top companies and excellent talents, I suddenly felt small. There is much that I lack and much more I need to learn, but it excites me. Even if I fail, this is a worthy life adventure because when I interact and compete with better people, I too become better.

So, unlike most startups worldwide, we are not born out of a specific problem. Instead, we are born from our life choices and value orientation.

To summarize, that is the driving force behind AxisNow.

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Now, let's address what AxisNow aims to do.

At first, to be honest, I was quite confused. I hadn't clearly defined what AxisNow was set out to accomplish, further complicated by language barriers, as I am still improving my English skills. However, I believe these to be temporary hurdles. I steadfastly believe that we can find our place in this broad world, guided by an obscure and immature idea in my mind.

Using the hammer and nail approach, I brainstormed all possible directions we could take based on our core capabilities. I need a rough direction to guide me and my team, and gradually explore and focus on what we can accomplish during this process.

From a macro perspective, I see three main types of products in the field of cybersecurity: Identity and Access (IAM, PAM, IGA, etc.), Traffic Control (network or application firewalls, gateways, etc.), and Identity combined with Traffic (ZTNA, SASE, micro-segmentation, etc.).

Furthermore, identity can be divided into two types: human identity and non-human identity.

Next, we conceived a macro architecture that envisions a traffic control platform that integrates human identity, non-human identity, or irrelevant identity. We began to describe this vision and architecture to those around us. However, many people were skeptical, believing it sounded too far-fetched. We want to do too many things, which is not the way of a startup. I am very happy to receive direct and meaningful feedback. This is too important for entrepreneurs to avoid falling into self-delusion and illusions.

We started to question ourselves. Maybe we were still too immature concerning business and startups. Maybe we hadn't indeed clarified what we wanted to do.

Throughout this process, I'm thankful for the company of ICE71 (especially Rayson), the unwavering trust from my co-founder James, the support from BaiShan Cloud partners. I appreciate the advice from Agora's Bin and Rogen, and the support and encouragement from our first Israeli friend, Raz. Moreover, I am grateful for our seed clients, partners, industry experts, and our families who supported and trusted us.

Having grand ambitions is good, but we need to start by providing people with the products they need the most, beginning from the smallest things.

We began contemplating this question. Among so many viable areas and dependent core competencies, what should we give up and what should we choose? What's our optimal development path? If I had a personal AI, capable of synthesizing all information, I believe it could guide me towards the decision with the best chance of success.

Yet for now, we can only rely on ourselves, meaning we need to establish some decision-making principles and selection criteria:

• Something you deeply love and are willing to pay the price for.

• A market space where it seems we can compete and offer unique value.

• Being time-friendly, meaning it enables sustainable development of core competencies over time.

Based on the principles mentioned above, we continue to explore and discover that with the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, non-human identities and M2M traffic are rapidly increasing. Organizations are facing an ever-growing attack surface, and engineering teams are experiencing increased complexity and operational burdens. Some startups have emerged in this field. Among them, there is a predecessor with a similar background to ours who is pioneering and leading a brand new market.

However, this raises another question: where should we start? With this question in mind, we further consulted potential customers and industry experts, combining our thoughts on the present and future. Ultimately, we identified two potential product directions:

One focuses on identity and access. Providing a central identity and access orchestration layer across all environments. This replaces the manual and insecure access that engineering teams have to non-human identities. We believe that such a critical infrastructure capability should be open-source.

The other focuses on edge and traffic. We found that combining edge with machine identity technology can more effectively address the challenges of security, performance, and observability for engineering teams regarding apps and APIs. Additionally, there is a lack of an elegant self-hosted edge solution in the world.

Although the problems addressed by both are different, their goals are consistent: help organizations properly adopt AI, APIs, automation, and cloud to protect and power critical digital businesses.

Next, we will quickly conduct A/B testing and market validation.

We are only at the beginning, an ICE71 incubated company (ICE71, headquartered in Singapore, is established by Singtel Group's venture capital arm, Singtel Innov8, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) through its entrepreneurial division, NUS Enterprise). We are still a small team of 11 people, but we have big ambitions and a mission. If you share our ethos, if you see this market opportunity, if you can help us accelerate our development, we welcome potential investors, clients, or partners to contact us and make this possible.

Eyes on the stars, and feet on the ground.

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Finally, allow me to pay my highest respects to the pioneers and founders of the industry!

• Most popular edge cloud among engineers：Cloudflare
• Workload IAM Pioneering Creator：Aembit
• Non-human identity management Pioneering Creator: Astrix

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