Jimmy Malhan

Founder & CEO, Pretense | The AI firewall that strips secrets, PHI, PII & proprietary code before it reaches ChatGPT, Copilot & every other AI tool | Built for SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

About

Your engineers paste code into ChatGPT every day. Your security team has no idea. I watched it happen at Samsung, at a $63B pharma acquisition, at Amazon, at a fintech moving real paychecks and at a health platform holding insurance data for millions of people. Same story every time: proprietary code, customer PII, patient records, passwords, and API keys leaving the building through a browser tab. No logs, alerts or checks and balances. Nobody catches it until it’s on the front page. The old security tools were built for email attachments. Your engineers stopped emailing code five years ago. So I built Pretense. 17 years building production systems at Amazon, Healthjoy, and Allergan Aesthetics taught that the fastest teams are the most exposed. Speed without guardrails isn’t innovation. It’s a countdown. Pretense sits between your engineer and the AI. It catches sensitive data like proprietary code, customer PII, patient records, passwords, API keys before it ever leaves the laptop. Nothing goes to the cloud. Engineers keep their tools. Security finally gets the audit trail. Set it and forget it. Installs in minutes. Ships without a procurement process. Works with every AI tool your team already uses like Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini. Covers SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS. If you lead security or engineering and you’re working out AI code governance you should check out Preense.ai

Experience

  • Investor at Jimmy Malhan LLC
    Dec 2024 - Present · 1 yr 7 mos

  • Founder & CEO at Pretense
    Apr 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    Your source code is the company. AI tools are eating it one paste at a time. Pretense stops that. A tiny local proxy catches proprietary code before it ever reaches ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or Gemini. Nothing leaves the laptop. Engineers don't change a thing. Built solo from zero to open beta. 500+ developers. Zero paid marketing. Open source. Covers SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS. Installs in minutes, not quarters. pretense.ai

  • Software Engineering Manager at Allergan Aesthetics, an AbbVie Company
    May 2024 - Mar 2026 · 1 yr 11 mos

    Led engineering through a $63B acquisition without dropping a patient. Ran the team behind patient and provider platforms used by hundreds of thousands of patients and thousands of clinics across North America. 99.9% uptime on healthcare-critical workflows. Moved the stack to microservices on AWS. Passed SOC2 Type II on the first try. Every decision made under HIPAA, FDA, and pharma compliance. The punchline: big merger, zero outage headlines.

  • Software Engineering Manager at HealthJoy
    Jan 2023 - Dec 2023 · 1 yr

  • CTO at AdvancePay
    Feb 2022 - Mar 2023 · 1 yr 2 mos