Our Team

Cryspen was founded in December 2021 by Karthik Bhargavan, Franziskus Kiefer, and Jonathan Protzenko, with the goal of adapting and extending cutting-edge formal verification tools developed at research labs like Inria and applying them to commercial software development.

In June 2026, Cryspen spun off CE Labs under the leadership of Franziskus to continue our work on Cryptographic Engineering. Cryspen itself pivoted to focus on developing formal verification tools for real-world security-critical software, funded by a new EIC Transition project called Spectrum.

Cryspen is now led by Karthik as Chief Scientist and CEO.