In Episode 6, we chat with Itan Barmes, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of QIZ Security. Barmes has spent years helping organizations prepare for quantum computing, and now focuses on a problem most enterprises have overlooked: cryptography is one of the most widely deployed security controls in the enterprise, but one of the least managed.
Cryptography Posture Management for the Post-Quantum Era
Barmes came to security from science. He holds a PhD in quantum physics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and spent six years leading Deloitte’s global quantum cyber readiness team, where he worked with banks, telecom operators, and healthcare organizations advising more than 100 organizations on cryptographic resilience. He is also a fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Quantum Security project. Across those engagements he saw the same gap: organizations wanted to prepare for the quantum threat but had no tools to find, prioritize, and fix cryptographic risk at scale.
That gap is becoming urgent. NIST finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 and set a timeline to deprecate today’s public-key encryption by 2030 and disallow it by 2035. Federal mandates are pushing agencies and contractors to move faster. Yet in most enterprises, cryptography is spread across cloud, on-premises systems, application code, and network traffic, and no one governs it centrally.
Barmes co-founded QIZ Security with serial entrepreneurs Ben Volkow and Lenny Ridel to turn post-quantum readiness from strategy into execution. The QIZ platform continuously discovers cryptographic assets across on-prem, cloud, code, and third-party software, ties them to business context, and matches every finding against the organization’s cryptography policy, so teams can tell which exposures matter most. It then helps them prioritize and carry out remediation as they move toward crypto-agility. In July 2026, QIZ announced a $17 million seed round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures.
The Innovator Series is meant to get inside the mind of the founder, and learn what inspired and motivated them to find success in the cybersecurity industry. Learn more about Itan Barmes and QIZ Security in our 18-minute conversation on YouTube.