Ashley Rose is the co-founder and chief executive of Living Security, a human risk management company in Austin, Texas. She worked as a product owner on enterprise software before founding Living Security in 2017 with her husband, Drew Rose, starting with an in-person cyber escape room.
A Kickstarter Swimsuit and a Product Career
Rose's first business came from a day at the beach with her daughter. She told Crunchbase that she launched Bella Bare Wear, a line of snap-change swimwear for children, which raised more than $21,000 on Kickstarter, and that Ninety days later, customers had a finished product in their hands, and my first business was up and running.
She then worked on a software team at American Campus Communities. She told Pulse 2.0 that the product owner role taught me two important things: just how complex enterprise workflows can be, and how central the human layer is in the overall risk equation.
An Escape Room in the Bonus Room
Drew Rose had built a cybersecurity program from the ground up, and he experimented with games as a better way to teach security, leading to the first Cyber Escape Room. Ashley Rose left her full-time job in late 2017 and was CEO by early 2018. She recalls the first office: we turned the bonus room in our Austin home into a 500-square-foot startup headquarters. At one point we had seven people working out of that spare room.
When the company raised money, she said, many investors doubted the concept, and starting out in a male-dominated industry left her feeling out of her depth at times. Her advice to founders: You’re going to hear a lot of ‘no’s, but you need to keep pushing forward.
She told Crunchbase that half of Living Security's team were women.
From Training to Human Risk Management
The escape rooms worked but did not scale, so the company moved online and then into measuring risk. Rose told Pulse 2.0 that the digital training gave the company visibility into how people learned, where they struggled, and which behaviors signaled risk.
In March 2026 Living Security launched its AI-native platform, which Rose said secures every identity in the workforce, human or AI, from a single intelligence layer.
Sources
- Crunchbase: Living Security CEO and Co-Founder Ashley Rose on Solving Human Cybersecurity Risk
- Pulse 2.0: Living Security profile and Ashley Rose interview
- TechCrunch: Living Security raises $14M (March 30, 2021)
- Living Security: AI-Native Human Risk Management Platform launch (March 24, 2026)
- Living Security: About us
Sources retrieved October 28, 2026.
