Chris Wallis

Growing Up on a Farm in England

The Code Story podcast describes him as the child who ran around the countryside climbing trees until his parents bought a computer when he was 15. After that he rarely left the house, teaching himself to code and digging into ethical hacking.

Testing and Defending Networks in Britain

He started his career as a penetration tester at the security consultancy Context, breaking into the networks of large UK companies, according to a write-up of a 2025 Cyber Runway founders session he spoke at. He then moved in-house to the payments company Worldpay, where he ran vulnerability management with tools such as Qualys. Intruder says he also worked for teams defending critical national infrastructure.

The Heartbleed bug in 2014 showed him what was missing. He told Safety Detectives: I was working in a finance organization when a new vulnerability called Heartbleed was announced. Scheduling scans and hunting down affected systems took hours of manual work. I thought that the software could be doing a much better job on our behalf.

Building Intruder Without Venture Money

He started Intruder with a friend. In 2017 he told UKTN that the tools at his employer were built for experts and hard to use: That made me wonder what other companies are doing and that’s when I teamed up with a friend of mine, an ethical hacker. Intruder won UKTN's cybersecurity startup of the year at its Elevator Pitch Live 2016 competition and was selected for GCHQ's Cyber Accelerator. So we’ve bootstrapped everything to date, he said then.

Small and mid-size businesses became Intruder's core market because the product was simple, which he has said was not the original plan. He keeps his attention on customers: We don’t tend to focus too much on the competition. We just focus on our customers. He sees ransomware as the main unsolved threat, driven by attackers looking for easy targets: The attackers are just out there looking for the low-hanging fruit, and if they catch you they can cost you millions. Intruder says it has more than 3,000 customers, and Code Story's episode title describes it as a $13 million bootstrapped business.

Tennis, Skiing and Surfing

He lives in London. Outside work he plays tennis, swims, skis and surfs, and Code Story notes that he goes through phases with each sport and rotates them often.