Published on: September 9, 2025 Updated 2 times since publishing
SafetyDetectives recently sat down with Simon Geiser, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenIAP, to talk about the future of automation and infrastructure. With a background spanning finance, consulting, and entrepreneurship, Simon has seen firsthand how promising ideas often fail — not because of a lack of innovation, but because of infrastructure and DevOps roadblocks. In this interview, he shares why he started OpenIAP, how the platform is redefining RPA with autonomous infrastructure and enterprise-grade security, and what companies should do to scale automation successfully.
Can you introduce yourself and share what inspired you to start OpenIAP?
We started OpenIAP because we saw how hard it was for companies to actually make those MVPs and POCs succeed in production. Too many innovative projects don’t fail because of a lack of great ideas, but because the infrastructure and DevOps bottlenecks.
My background in finance, consulting, and entrepreneurship taught me that enterprises need more than tools — they need autonomous infrastructure that makes new technologies like AI succeed in the real world, even in the most demanding, high-security environments.
For readers unfamiliar with OpenIAP, what does the platform do, and what makes it unique in the RPA space?
OpenIAP provides best in class automation and infrastructure that lets organizations build, run, and scale intelligent workflows across any system and for developers and non-technical users alike.
Unlike traditional RPA, it isn’t just about task automation — we provide autonomous infrastructure, enterprise-grade security, and orchestration capabilities that work from startups all the way up to government and military-grade installations.
Performance bottlenecks can kill automation adoption. What steps should be taken to ensure workflows run fast and reliably at scale?
The key is building automation on infrastructure that’s both lightweight and elastic. That’s why in two weeks we’re releasing the world’s fastest and most flexible serverless infrastructure, enabling workflows to run at massive scale without bottlenecks. It adapts automatically, so performance never becomes a barrier to adoption.
Scaling automation often leads to security gaps and compliance issues. What safeguards are built into OpenIAP to prevent this?
Security is designed into OpenIAP from the ground up, it is one of our core pillars. We meet the highest compliance standards and deploy in environments ranging from enterprise to military-grade, ensuring encryption, access controls, and auditability at every step.
This way, companies can scale confidently without exposing themselves to hidden risks.
Security and reliability are critical in automation — how does OpenIAP address these challenges?
OpenIAP offers enterprise-level governance and can even run without internet connection (air gapped). Now we are building self-healing infrastructure to take that to the next level.
That means if something fails, the system recovers automatically, and data remains fully protected. Our approach ensures reliability even under the strictest security requirements — because a backend without trust simply doesn’t work.
From your experience, what’s the most common mistake companies make when starting their automation journey, and how does OpenIAP help them avoid it?
Many companies start small but underestimate what it takes to scale automation securely. The benefits are achieved once the project is completed, and many companies shie away from investing in the process to build automation properly from the get go.
I think that’s why so many efforts fail, in order to save money with automation you first need to invest in it. They end up with siloed solutions that don’t meet enterprise standards. OpenIAP avoids this by giving them a future-proof foundation — autonomous infrastructure that works just as well for a startup project as it does in a global enterprise with the toughest compliance demands.