Jules Drean

Jules Drean is the Co-founder of Tinfoil, a Y Combinator-backed technology startup focused on developing secure, verifiable, and private artificial intelligence workflows. He recently completed his doctorate at MIT CSAIL under the advisement of Srini Devadas and Mengjia Yan, where he specialized in secure hardware and confidential computing. During his academic tenure, Drean built secure enclaves from the ground up and researched robust defenses against transient execution and microarchitectural side-channel attacks. Prior to launching his current entrepreneurial venture, he gained applied industry experience researching secure hardware technologies and authentic embedded devices at Microsoft Research and NVIDIA. His foundational technical work integrates trusted hardware systems with advanced cryptographic primitives, including fully homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation protocols. Drean's professional work currently focuses on advancing privacy-preserving technologies to enable confidential large language model training and secure data processing.