From National Service to a Cyber Security Career
Zayne grew up in Singapore. Like every Singaporean man, he had to serve two years of military service, and he was fortunate enough to be assigned to cyber security rather than infantry training. Instead of training with rifles in the jungle, he spent his service coding and testing systems for vulnerabilities, helping his team fix them before they became a problem.
From there, he studied computer science at Cambridge, spending much of his time there working freelance in penetration testing (pentesting). He also worked with Cure53, a German pentesting firm, and took part in a string of Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions and competitive hacking contests. Those CTFs are where he met the people who would eventually become his co-founders and much of Hacktron's founding team.
A Conviction About Where AI Was Headed
Hacktron AI builds security agents that review software for real, exploitable vulnerabilities before it reaches production. The goal is to let engineering teams secure every code change without creating a manual bottleneck of security engineers checking each release by hand. The agents help fix what they find, too, since surfacing vulnerabilities is only half the job.
Zayne and his co-founders started the company in mid-2025, when large language models were becoming genuinely good at understanding and reasoning about code and logic. As pentesters themselves, they made an early bet: if AI was going to get good at coding, it would also get good at cybersecurity, since training a model on large volumes of code means training it on a large volume of existing vulnerability patterns too. That read on where things were headed is one they believe has played out. Hacktron has since launched its product, raised three million dollars in funding, and is now focused on scaling.
As pentesters and software engineers, we knew that if you're training AI models to be good at coding, you're training them on a lot of existing vulnerability patterns too. That means it's likely to be good at cyber security as well.
Why Singapore Made Sense for a Remote-First Team
Hacktron is a distributed team, remote-first from day one, with employees working from wherever they are and co-working spaces in Singapore. Zayne and his co-founders chose to set up a Singapore entity early on because Singapore has strong engineering talent without the same level of hiring competition a startup would face in San Francisco, where a young company is up against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic for the same candidates.
Because the team was already distributed, Hacktron could base its engineering in Singapore while still selling into the US. As the company grew, it also began doing more business with Singaporean entities, which added urgency to having a proper local structure in place.
Finding Osome: Looking for a Self-Serve Way to Incorporate
When Zayne incorporated in the US, he had used Stripe Atlas, a service where founders fill in a form and the incorporation happens in the background. He wanted the same experience for Singapore: a platform where he could submit what was needed and have the process handled for him, with the same platform and the same people available later for ongoing filings and annual returns.
Osome stood out because it seemed to be one of the few options built for exactly that kind of self-serve process. The onboarding was straightforward, just a handful of questions before it was done. Hacktron's structure added some complexity, since a parent entity meant more Know Your Customer (KYC) and validation on the Singapore side, but Zayne found the process well explained, and he could sign everything directly on the platform.
Osome seemed like one of the only options where I could just self-serve the entire process. The onboarding was quite seamless, just a few questions, and it was done.
Corp Sec, Compliance and Peace of Mind
Alongside incorporation, Hacktron is on Osome's Corp Sec plan, which covers annual filing and AGM paperwork. Daisy, from Osome's team, handled Zayne's incorporation.
Zayne has run a Singapore entity without this kind of support before. Back in 2020, he co-founded a small cybersecurity consulting company in Singapore with three friends, without a Corp Sec in place, and handled everything themselves. He describes it as a mess, the kind of admin that competes for time with actually running the business. That experience is part of why the peace of mind matters to him now: knowing that a running list of compliance requirements is being tracked properly, rather than something he has to hold in his own head.
It definitely saved me a lot of time and a lot of stress, at least five or six hours just from incorporation. I value my time at around $ 200 an hour, and I'd rather spend it on whatever gives the company the most leverage, not on paperwork someone else can handle just as well.
Long-Term Vision, Short-Term Action: Advice From a Founder
Zayne's advice to new founders is to validate a problem they believe will still exist ten years from now, rather than one that only fits the moment. Hacktron's own founding thesis followed that logic: back in 2023 and 2024, AI was still improving at coding, and the trajectory suggested it would keep improving in ways that also mattered for cybersecurity. Building around a longer-term belief like that, he says, means designing for what the world will look like in a few years, not just for what is true today, which gives a company a better chance of lasting.
What's Next: From Co-Pilot to Autopilot
Hacktron has spent its first year making it easier for teams to find vulnerabilities before they reach production. The next step, a feature called Automations, is about helping teams act on what is found, closing the loop so the product moves from being a co-pilot to something closer to an autopilot.
Zayne sees a distinction between the two. A co-pilot amplifies what a skilled engineer can already do. But not every company is large enough to have a dedicated security team to begin with. For those teams, Hacktron's aim is always-on agents that can act on findings on a team's behalf, moving towards what Zayne describes as a fully autopilot approach to security, which is the direction he is most excited to build towards next.
