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Simon Taylor
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, HYCU, Inc.

How HYCU And Dell Turn Backups Into Cyber Intelligence

📅 May 20, 2026 evan kirstel 9 MIN 10 VIEWS 21 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Interested in being a guest? Email us at [email protected] (https://www.buzzsprout.com/2228835/fa...) Your backup system is sitting on a gold mine and most companies are treating it like a fire extinguisher behind glass. From the floor of Dell Technologies World, we talk with Simon Taylor CEO of HYCU about their next chapter: HYCU Air, an AI resiliency platform designed to turn SaaS backup data into something you can actually interrogate, learn from, and use to stay ahead of cyber risk.  We dig into the big idea that the most valuable asset is not the LLM itself, but the unique dataset...

What Simon Taylor said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of HYCU, discussed the company's partnership with Dell and the launch of HYCU Air, an AI resiliency platform. He said HYCU has 4,800 customers in 76 countries and protects 106 SaaS applications. Taylor argued that data sets, not LLMs, are the most valuable asset, and HYCU Air uses a knowledge graph and context engine to let users query backup data in natural language. He outlined three cyber intelligence use cases: security posture management, data classification, and customizable agents. Taylor reported strong demand, including 100 Global 2000 companies on the waitlist and 10 Fortune 500 companies using the product, and predicted HYCU Air would be 25% of revenue by year-end. He emphasized the shift from recovery-only backup to proactive risk management, and encouraged customers to join the waitlist at hycu.com.

Key takeaways

  1. HYCU Air is an AI resiliency platform that lets users query backup data in natural language for cyber intelligence.
  2. 100 Global 2000 companies are on the HYCU Air waitlist, and 10 Fortune 500 companies are already using it.
  3. HYCU Air is expected to be 25% of HYCU's revenue by the end of 2026.
  4. HYCU protects 106 different SaaS applications, which Taylor says is the world's most comprehensive data set.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
4,800 HYCU customers metric 0:23
76 countries with HYCU customers metric 0:23
106 SaaS applications protected by HYCU metric 0:23
100 Global 2000 companies on HYCU Air waitlist metric 5:20
10 Fortune 500 companies using HYCU Air metric 5:20
25% expected HYCU Air share of revenue by end of year guidance 5:20
100 customers at Dell cloud field days in Minneapolis metric 5:20

Chapters

  1. 0:00Partnership with Dell and HYCU overview
  2. 0:23HYCU Air launch and AI resiliency
  3. 1:25Problems HYCU Air solves
  4. 2:10Value of data sets over LLMs
  5. 3:19Cyber intelligence use cases
  6. 5:12Customer demand and revenue expectations
  7. 6:10SaaS sprawl and proactive risk management
  8. 7:49How to get started with HYCU Air
  9. 8:34AI adoption and industry energy

Questions asked in this interview

5
  1. 0:01And we are live at Dell Technologies World with Haiku. Simon, how are you?
  2. 0:10Maybe describe some of the work you're doing with Dell and also how do you describe Haiku these days?
  3. 5:12And what's been the feedback from customers and from your partnership at Dell? What's the demand been like?
  4. 7:49And when can they start taking advantage? What's the timeline?
  5. 8:20How's the energy this week and we've got a day or two left. What's else on your mind?
Evan 0:01 ↗
And we are live at Dell Technologies World with Haiku. Simon, how are you?
Simon Taylor 0:06 ↗
Evan, doing great. Great to be here and great to see you again, my friend.
Evan 0:10 ↗
Well, great to see you in action in your partnership, all this innovation with Dell. Maybe describe some of the work you're doing with Dell and also how do you describe Haiku these days? You've been busy.
Simon Taylor 0:23 ↗
We've been very busy. You know, it's great to be back with our good friends at Dell. As you know, we are already on the ETC price list, which has been phenomenal for us. It's allowed us to engage with Dell customers and partners around the planet. Today, we've got 4,800 customers in 76 countries, and we are growing stronger than ever before. But you know, the big change, the big watershed moment for Haiku this year is of course the launch of what we're calling Haiku Air. Haiku's AI resiliency platform. Haiku is going from being the SaaS player with 106 different SaaS applications protected to the world's number one leader in AI resilience because what we've realized is that all of this agent deployment is changing the game when it comes to services of record. People need to be able to do more than just back up and recover their data. They need to be able to leverage the data they have within those SaaS platforms and protect it at machine speed. And that's exactly what Haiku is here to do.
Evan 1:25 ↗
Fantastic. And talk about the problems that Haiku Air is solving that traditional backup or data protection tools aren't addressing. Well,
Simon Taylor 1:33 ↗
Yeah. You know, I was talking to my 13-year-old son the other day about exactly this, and he kept saying to me, Simon, Dad, I don't understand. I don't understand. What do you guys do? And I said, think of it like this. You know, we're sitting at a table and there's a camera over the table, a security camera, and somebody sticks some gum under the table. Well, if there is a security guard watching the camera and watching the monitor at that moment, they're going to catch it. But if that gum was stuck there a week ago, two weeks ago, two years ago, or even, God help us, two decades ago. Well, unless you've got the backup tapes, you're never going to know who committed the crime. And that's the major problem that Haiku Air solves.
We realize the single most powerful and valuable asset today is not the LLM. The LLMs are commoditized. They're all essentially doing the same thing with incremental leaps. It's actually the data sets themselves that represent a gold mine when it comes to actual levels of value. So, said very differently, the more custom and unique your data set is, the more valuable it should be to you and your company. So, Haiku realizing this understood that we've been protecting 106 different applications that nobody else in the world is protecting. So what we did is we added a knowledge graph and a context engine, put an LLM on top of that, and called it Haiku Air so that in natural language you can now speak to your backup data.
So yeah, no, it's unbelievable. The first time the guy showed it to me I said this can't be real. How did you? And the answer of course is AI, but the answer is also we've spent nine years building the world's most comprehensive data set on planet earth. And so when you put AI on top of that, you've got something very special indeed.
Now Evan, you asked me what problems we're actually solving with all that great information. And I'll tell you, you could solve so many problems. It's a vast universe. But what we are focusing on here with Air is cyber intelligence. And I would break that down into three different ways. One, security posture management. With all these agents running amok, with all these different apps and databases, with data silos sprawl going on, who the heck knows where your data is and what's happening to you? Well, you can actually go in in natural language and say, who is misbehaving with their data? Who is acting out of policy? Is there policy drift? You know, use case number two, you can go in and look at data classification. You could say to it, who's got data they shouldn't have? Who's got social security numbers and personally identifiable information sitting on a laptop? It's all there. The records are all there in the backups. We just couldn't ask for it until today. And so I think you know Haiku Air is a watershed moment in the world of data protection. It's a watershed moment in the world of cyber security. We've even built a customizable agent part so that you can add additional agents that will allow you to ask your own questions and derive your unique value from the actual platform.
So the last thing I'll say, Evan, and this is super important. People have been backing up data for donkey's years, as my mother would say, and you know, they only did it for one reason, which was recovery. But recovery was never enough. We're taking data protection from the world of life insurance sales to the world of health insurance and healthcare because we're going to help you to take care of your business. We're going to stop making you pay just for the recovery. You're going to get all of this unique value with the data stream backup all as a part of being a customer. So, it truly is a very, very exciting time for us. As always, I'm just thrilled to share it with you.
Evan 5:12 ↗
Fantastic. And what's been the feedback from customers and from your partnership at Dell? What's the demand been like?
Simon Taylor 5:20 ↗
You know, I was in Minneapolis with Dell last week at their cloud field days. And I got up in front of about 100 customers and they literally let out a cheer when I said, 'Do more with your backup data.' Because you know people have been paying for this stuff forever and it was always just about their recovery. The idea that they could now extract all this additional incremental value that will keep them and their companies safe, it was a game changer. So, you know, the response has been incredible. We've had a hundred companies in the Global 2000 already added to our wait list. We've got 10 Fortune 500 companies who have already tried it out, are using it. By the end of this year, we believe this will be about 25% of HYCU's revenue overall. I mean the demand is that drastic. We're seeing AI levels of growth attached purely to the Haiku Air product.

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Taylor, S. (2026, May 20). How HYCU And Dell Turn Backups Into Cyber Intelligence [Interview transcript]. evan kirstel. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1096232/

MLA

Simon Taylor. "How HYCU And Dell Turn Backups Into Cyber Intelligence." evan kirstel, 20 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1096232/.

BibTeX
@misc{taylor2026_1096232,
  author       = {Simon Taylor},
  title        = {How HYCU And Dell Turn Backups Into Cyber Intelligence},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, evan kirstel. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {may},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1096232/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}