It started with a frustration everyone in cybersecurity knows.
Scanon began the way most necessary things do: with someone getting fed up.
Axel Rives had spent years inside the privacy and cybersecurity world, first as an advocate for digital rights, then as an operator. In 2024, he founded Unlimited Coverage Cybersecurity, an e-commerce company focused on private phones and secure communication. The business worked. But every day, he watched the same pattern repeat: customers wanted privacy, genuinely, urgently, and the industry kept handing them tools that demanded hours of manual effort to use.
Privacy had become a tax on people's time. And a protection you don't have time to use is no protection at all.
Then came the realization that changed everything. After years of helping people secure how they communicate, encrypted phones, private channels, hardened devices, Axel saw that the real exposure was somewhere else entirely.
The risk isn't how you send it.
It's what you send.
The bystander's face in the background of a field photo. The license plate parked in front of a property listing. The client's address sitting in the corner of a scanned document. No encrypted pipe protects you from the sensitive information visible inside the files flowing through it.
That insight became Scanon: an AI redaction layer that sees what a human reviewer would miss, finds every face, plate, ID, and personal detail across images, video, and documents, and removes it automatically, so protection finally moves as fast as the business does.
But a vision this size needed a second builder. In February 2026, through Y Combinator's co-founder matching platform, Axel met Pranaw, a computer vision and AI researcher who had left Chennai, India for the United States to build something that mattered, earning his Master's in Computer Science at SUNY Albany along the way. They started with trial projects. Then came the calls: three, four, 6-7 times a week, nearly every day, across time zones and continents, turning an idea into working software through every trial and setback that remote building throws at you.
Somewhere between the late-night debugging sessions and the architecture debates, something else happened: they became genuine friends. Two founders from opposite sides of the world — Washington, D.C. and Chennai — shaped by different cultures, driven by exactly the same conviction: privacy should be a default, not a chore.
That conviction is now a product. And it's just the beginning. Today, Scanon protects over 160 users & is in beta with 2 pilot partners.
