Ian Riopel, CEO and Co-Founding father of Root.io, leads the corporate’s mission to secure the software supply chain with cloud-native solutions. With over 15 years in tech and cybersecurity, he has held leadership roles at Slim.AI and FXP, specializing in enterprise sales, go-to-market strategy, and public sector growth. He holds an ACE from MIT Sloan and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Intelligence School.
Root.io is a cloud-native security platform designed to assist enterprises secure their software supply chain. By automating trust and compliance across development pipelines, Root.io enables faster, more reliable software delivery for contemporary DevOps teams.
What inspired the founding of Root, and the way did the thought for Automated Vulnerability Remediation (AVR) come about?
Root was born from a deep frustration we repeatedly faced firsthand: organizations dedicating massive amounts of time and resources to chasing vulnerabilities that never fully went away. Triage had develop into the one defense against rapidly accruing CVE technical debt, but with the speed of emerging vulnerabilities, triage alone simply is not enough anymore.
As maintainers of Slim Toolkit (formerly DockerSlim), we were already deeply engaged in container optimization and security. It was natural for us to ask: What if containers could proactively fix themselves as a part of the usual software development lifecycle? Automated fixing, now referred to as Automated Vulnerability Remediation (“AVR”), was our solution—an approach not focused on triage and list constructing, but robotically eliminates them, directly in your software, without introducing breaking changes.
Root was formerly referred to as Slim.AI—what prompted the rebrand, and the way did the corporate evolve during that transition?
Slim.AI began as a tool to assist developers minimize and optimize containers. But we soon realized our technology had evolved into something way more impactful: a robust platform able to proactively securing software for production at scale. The rebrand to Root captures this transformative shift—from a developer optimization tool to a strong security solution that empowers any organization to fulfill rigorous security demands around open-source software in minutes. Root embodies our mission: attending to the foundation of software risk and remediating vulnerabilities before they ever develop into incidents.
You’ve got got a team with deep roots in cybersecurity, from Cisco, Trustwave, and Snyk. How did your collective experience shape the DNA of Root?
Our team has built security scanners, defended global enterprises, and architected solutions for a few of the most sensitive and high-stakes infrastructures. We have grappled directly with the trade-offs between speed, security, and developer experience. This collective experience fundamentally shaped Root’s DNA. We’re obsessive about automation and integration—not merely identifying security issues but solving them swiftly without creating latest friction. Our experience informs every decision, ensuring that security accelerates innovation moderately than slows it down.
Root claims to patch container vulnerabilities in seconds—no rebuilds, no downtime. How does your AVR technology actually work under the hood?
AVR works directly on the container layer, swiftly identifying vulnerable packages and patching or replacing them throughout the image itself—without requiring complex rebuilds. Consider it as seamlessly hot-swapping vulnerable code snippets with secure replacements while preserving your dependencies, layers, and runtime behaviors. No more waiting on upstream patches, no must re-architect your pipelines. It’s remediation on the speed of innovation.
Are you able to explain what sets Root other than other security solutions like Chainguard or Rapidfort? What’s your edge on this space?
Unlike Chainguard, which mandates rebuilds using curated images, or Rapidfort, which shrinks attack surfaces without directly addressing vulnerabilities, Root directly patches your existing container images. We seamlessly integrate into your pipeline without disruption—no friction, no handoffs. We’re not here to exchange your workflow, we’re here to speed up and enhance it. Every image that runs through Root essentially becomes a golden image—fully secured, transparent, controlled–delivering rapid ROI by slashing vulnerabilities and saving time. Our platform cuts remediation from weeks or days to only 120-180 seconds, enabling corporations in highly regulated industries to eliminate months-long vulnerability backlogs in a single session.
Developers needs to be focused on constructing and shipping latest products – not spending hours fixing security vulnerabilities, a time-consuming and infrequently dreaded aspect of software development that stalls innovation. Worse, a lot of these vulnerabilities aren’t even their very own – they stem from weaknesses in third-party vendors or open-source software projects, forcing teams to spend invaluable hours fixing another person’s problem.
Developers and R&D teams are amongst the most important cost centers in any organization, each by way of human resources and the software and cloud infrastructure that supports them. Root alleviates this burden by leveraging agentic AI, moderately than counting on teams of developers working across the clock to manually check and patch known vulnerabilities.
How does Root specifically leverage agentic AI to automate and streamline the vulnerability remediation process?
Our AVR engine uses agentic AI to copy the thought processes and actions of a seasoned security engineer—rapidly assessing CVE impact, identifying the perfect available patches, rigorously testing, and safely applying fixes. It accomplishes in seconds what would otherwise require significant manual effort, scaling across 1000’s of images concurrently. Every remediation teaches the system, repeatedly enhancing its effectiveness and adaptableness, essentially embedding the expertise of a full-time security engineer directly into your images.
How does Root integrate into existing developer workflows without adding friction?
Root effortlessly integrates into existing workflows, plugging directly into your container registry or pipeline—no rebasing, no latest agents, and no additional sidecars. Developers push images as usual, and Root handles patching and publishing updated images seamlessly in place or as latest tags. Our solution stays invisible until needed, offering complete visibility through detailed audit trails, comprehensive SBOMs, and easy rollback options when desired.
How do you balance automation and control? For teams that want visibility and oversight, how customizable is Root?
At Root, automation enhances—not diminishes—control. Our platform is very customizable, allowing teams to scale the extent of automation to their specific needs. You choose what to auto-apply, when to involve manual review, and what to exclude. We offer extensive visibility through detailed diff views, changelogs, and impact analyses, ensuring security teams remain informed and empowered, never left at the hours of darkness.
With 1000’s of vulnerabilities fixed robotically, how do you ensure stability and avoid breaking dependencies or disrupting production?
Stability and reliability underpin every motion that Root’s AVR takes. By default, we adopt a conservative approach, meticulously tracking dependency graphs, employing compatibility-aware patches, and rigorously testing every remediated image against all publicly available testing frameworks for open-source projects before deployment. Should a problem ever arise, it’s caught early, and rollback is effortless. In practice, we’ve maintained lower than a 0.1% failure rate across 1000’s of automated remediations.
As AI advances, so do potential attack surfaces. How is Root preparing for emerging AI-era security threats?
We view AI as each a possible threat vector and a defensive superpower. Root is proactively embedding resilience directly into the software supply chain, ensuring that containerized workloads—including complex AI/ML stacks—are repeatedly hardened. Our agentic AI evolves as threats evolve, autonomously adapting defenses faster than attackers can act. Our ultimate goal is autonomous software supply chain resilience: infrastructure that defends itself on the speed of emerging threats.
