Changming Liu still keeps a 2006 calendar titled “always believe in your dreams,” a gift from his kids from the year he started Aerohive Networks, a cloud networking company he founded and took public in 2014. As an entrepreneur, he’s kept it for the stretches when building stops feeling like momentum and starts feeling like stamina.
Today, he’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Stellar Cyber, taking aim at a daily problem in cybersecurity operations: teams trying to see what’s happening across a scattered security stack—and act fast without adding more tools.
Stellar Cyber frames that work through an open security operations platform that brings multiple layers together in one place. In the company’s own description, it spans AI-driven SIEM, NDR, and Open XDR, with the ambitious goal of an “open, unified, and human-augmented autonomous SOC.” The point is simple enough to recognize in practice: fewer handoffs between disconnected systems, and more decisions made with the full context in view.
Liu’s most concrete explanation starts with the day-to-day mechanics inside a security operations center. “Just a few years ago, analysts manually correlated alerts across disconnected tools,” he said. Stellar Cyber’s bet is that the stitching happens before an analyst ever starts clicking around—turning scattered signals into “prioritized cases–not alerts,” so teams begin with a coherent picture.
That bet runs into a trust boundary. Liu notes customers respond “with both excitement and caution” as automation gets more capable. He keeps the responsibility line clear: “human-in-the-loop designs,” where “AI handles scale and speed, while humans make judgment calls.” He’s also blunt about shortcuts: “GenAI cannot solve detection on its own.”
The company’s public traction points toward who lives with this pressure most acutely. Stellar Cyber now serves more than 14,000 customers worldwide and about one-third of the top 250 MSSPs.
Liu believes the industry learned the wrong lesson for years: “That complexity equals protection. In truth, simplification through unification is the most powerful defense.” The hard part sits in the middle: earning trust in systems that move faster than humans can, while keeping humans responsible for the call. That’s the kind of work Stellar Cyber is doing.