Femmes Finance Podcast aims to support , educate & empower young women to achieve career success and financial freedom. In each episode, Assel Altayeva talks with successful leaders, entrepreneurs, founders, and investors to inspire you in your journey to financial freedom.
How to Build, Deploy & Monetize Secure AI Agents | Cathy Di, Dedalus Labs (YC S25)
Cathy Di is the co‑founder and CEO of Dedalus Labs, a YC startup building the infrastructure layer for agentic AI that lets developers build and deploy complex agents in just a few lines of code.
In this conversation, she talks through the technical problems behind agent security, deployment, and MCP-based tooling, and how her team is approaching them with a developer-native platform. We also get into the story of applying to YC, participating in the S25 batch, and raising an $11M seed round co-led by Kindred Ventures and Saga Ventures. Cathy shares what changed in the market, what investors actually asked about, and how her thinking on agents, protocols, and infra has evolved along the way.
Before Dedalus Labs, she studied Computer Science at Princeton University and was Co‑President + Incubator Leader at the student-run Hoagie Club.
01:01 - Dedalus Labs
03:57 - MCP and AI Agents
06:49 - Build, Deploy, Monetize AI Agents
08:14 - Security Concerns
12:12 - The future of AI Agents
15:32 - YC and Fundraising
28:09 - Final Advice and Book Recs
Cathy’s Socials:
• Dedalus Labs: https://www.dedaluslabs.ai (https://www.dedaluslabs.ai)
• X: https://x.com/itsCathyDi (https://x.com/itsCathyDi)
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cathydi/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cathydi/)
3 Oct 2025
Navigating the Hard Tech Era: Alana Karen on Big Tech, Layoffs, AI, and Moving On
Alana Karen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanakaren/) is an award-winning tech leader, author, and speaker with over 25 years in tech, including two decades at Google (https://www.linkedin.com/company/google/). She has worked across Google Search, Ads, Fiber, and Grants, helping build products and teams that have touched billions of people globally. Alana is also the author of the best-selling book "Adventures of Women in Tech", now releasing a brand new edition that explores how work, culture, and careers are shifting in the AI era.
In this episode of the Femmes Finance Podcast (https://www.linkedin.com/company/femmesfinance/), we talk with Alana Karen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanakaren/) about her journey after Google and moving on to new opportunities. We discuss her thoughts on future careers, Big Tech layoffs, and adapting to major cultural and technological shifts. Lastly, Alana Karen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanakaren/) shares great advice on how to build a financial and career resilience in today’s fast-moving tech era.
Follow Alana Karen:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanakaren/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanakaren/)
Website: https://www.alanakaren.com (https://www.alanakaren.com)
Follow Assel Altayeva:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asselaltayeva/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/asselaltayeva/)
Instagram: @femmesfinance
27 May 2025
Cathy Hackl on Spatial Computing, Apple Vision Pro, and Building with AI, XR & Immersive Tech
Cathy Hackl, tech futurist, discusses spatial computing, the Apple Vision Pro, and the convergence of AI, XR, and immersive technology with Assel Altayeva, offering insights into the future of human-computer interaction in this interview.
Inside a recent episode
How to Build, Deploy & Monetize Secure AI Agents | Cathy Di, Dedalus Labs (YC S25)
Published 23 Mar 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] Here's our approach at Daedalus. You can't ensure that an agent will not hand over your secrets to someone malicious, but you can ensure that your agent never sees your secrets. So something that we've released recently is the first open source secure and multi-tenant MCP auth framework out there. It's called DeAuth. And what makes DeAuth different from existing security solutions is that it not only covers OAuth 2.1, but it also covers every other single case of auth. We wrote our own enclave in Rust. It's networkless. And it guarantees that neither the host platform, so neither Daedalus nor any of your host tools, servers, models, agents, will ever see your client's secrets. […]
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