Founders on Fire with Balázs Scheidler of Axoflow

In this episode of Founders on Fire, host Rose Ross sits down with Balázs Scheidler, CEO and co-founder of Axoflow.

Balázs was named the winner of the 2025 Male CxO Trailblazers Award, while Axoflow was a runner-up in the 2025 Firestarter Trailblazers Award.

In the conversation, Balázs reflects on how these two recognitions added to a growing sense of momentum around Axoflow, alongside securing investment, reaching important customer milestones and moving from product-market fit into the company’s next stage of growth.

He also shares the lessons accumulated during almost three decades of working with logs, from creating the open-source project syslog-ng as a university student to building and selling his first enterprise technology company, then returning to startup life with Axoflow.

Three decades of log obsession

Balázs describes himself as having been obsessed with logs for almost 30 years.

That journey began at university, where he created syslog-ng in 1998. The open-source project went on to become widely used by enterprises around the world and provided the technical foundation for his first startup, BalaBit, which he co-founded in 2000.

Growing BalaBit from Central Europe into a global enterprise technology business required patience, persistence and a willingness to learn almost every aspect of building a company. The business was bootstrapped over 18 years before being acquired in 2018.

For Balázs, that experience was both a technical journey and an extended education in company-building: developing products, creating enterprise structures, winning international customers and learning how to scale beyond a startup’s home market.

Solving the security data problem

Axoflow brings that depth of experience to one of the most pressing challenges facing modern security operations teams: the growing volume, complexity and cost of log data.

Organisations depend on security information and event management platforms, or SIEMs, to identify threats and support investigations. However, the data flowing into those systems is often inconsistent, poorly formatted, duplicated or simply not useful enough to justify the cost of collecting, processing and storing it.

Axoflow is building an autonomous Security Data Layer between an organisation’s log sources and its SIEM and analytics platforms. It collects, cleans, standardises, enriches and filters security and operational data before sending it to its destination.

The aim is to give security teams more reliable, actionable information while reducing the manual effort and expense involved in managing complex data pipelines.

Making security operations more manageable

The problem is not simply that enterprises generate too much data. It is that security teams frequently have to spend considerable time repairing and maintaining the systems that move that data.

A source may change its log format. A pipeline may begin dropping messages. A destination may receive information that it cannot interpret consistently. Each change can create more manual work and make it harder for analysts to trust the data in front of them.

By automating much of the classification, normalisation and routing process, Axoflow aims to remove that burden. Better data quality can make investigations faster and more reliable, while filtering unnecessary information can help organisations control SIEM ingestion and storage costs.

As Balázs explains, the objective is not to replace the SIEM. It is to ensure the SIEM receives better data in the first place.

What changes for a second-time founder?

The conversation also offers a fascinating comparison between building a first startup and returning to the process with decades of experience.

Balázs’s first company grew through a long bootstrapped journey. With Axoflow, he and his co-founders have been able to move faster by applying lessons already learned about product management, enterprise sales, organisational design and investor relations.

Experience does not remove the uncertainty involved in creating a startup, but it can make decisions clearer. Founders know which structures are needed, which distractions to avoid and when a business must change from proving its technology to building a repeatable growth engine.

Having reached product-market fit, Axoflow is now moving into that growth stage as the company looks towards Series A and the next phase of its development.

Awards recognition as part of startup momentum

Balázs also reflects on Axoflow’s success in the 2025 Tech Trailblazers Awards.

His win in the Male CxO Trailblazers Award recognised the leadership and experience behind the company, while Axoflow’s Firestarter Trailblazers Award runner-up placing highlighted the potential of the young business itself.

For an early-stage company, recognition rarely stands alone. Its value comes from becoming part of a wider pattern of progress: investment secured, customers won, products validated and external experts taking notice.

Together, those signals can help strengthen confidence among employees, customers, partners and investors. In Axoflow’s case, the Awards arrived at a point when the company was building commercial and technical momentum, providing another independent marker of its progress.

From AI sceptic to advocate

Artificial intelligence inevitably enters the discussion, but Balázs’s perspective has changed considerably over the past year.

Once sceptical about the practical value of modern AI, he now likens its potential impact to the steam engine: a general-purpose technology capable of changing how an enormous range of work gets done.

Within Axoflow’s world, AI can help automate repetitive tasks, respond to changes in log formats and reduce the manual intervention required to keep security data usable. This allows experienced people to spend less time maintaining pipelines and more time applying judgement to important security decisions.

That distinction matters. AI can accelerate work and remove mundane tasks, but human expertise remains essential for deciding what matters, interpreting context and taking responsibility for the outcome.

A startup is a marathon, not a side project

Balázs’s advice to aspiring founders is direct: endurance and commitment matter.

Building an enterprise technology company takes time. Products must be developed, customers earned, teams assembled and setbacks absorbed. Even with experience, there are no shortcuts through that process.

A startup therefore cannot be treated as a casual, part-time experiment if the ambition is to build something substantial. Founders need to commit fully to the problem they are solving and be prepared for a long journey.

That does not mean following the same plan regardless of the evidence. It means staying committed to the mission while continuing to learn, adapt and make difficult decisions along the way.

Tune in to hear Balázs Scheidler discuss three decades of log management, the lessons he carried from syslog-ng and BalaBit into Axoflow, why security teams need better data before it reaches the SIEM, how his view of AI has changed and what founders should understand before committing themselves to the startup journey.

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Could you be our next Male CxO or Firestarter Trailblazer?

Balázs Scheidler was named the winner of the 2025 Male CxO Trailblazers Award, recognising the leadership, innovation and impact of senior executives within enterprise technology startups.

Axoflow was also named a runner-up in the 2025 Firestarter Trailblazers Award, which celebrates ambitious early-stage technology companies with the potential to make a significant impact.

The Tech Trailblazers Awards celebrate innovative startups, scale-ups and the people building technologies that solve important enterprise problems.

Explore the Male CxO Trailblazers Award

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The deadline for submissions has been extended. Entries close on 17 September 2026.