Practitioners building for practitioners

Laura Bell Main is a New Zealand-based application security practitioner, speaker, and educator with more than a decade of experience working with software engineering teams on security uplift. She has spoken at security conferences across New Zealand, Australia, and internationally on practical AppSec, developer security culture, and making security accessible to teams without dedicated security headcount.

She has been involved in the OWASP New Zealand community for years, contributing to the local security practitioner community and advocating for security education that speaks the language of engineers — not compliance officers.

Laura founded SafeStack in 2023 after repeatedly observing the same pattern: engineering teams that genuinely wanted to build secure software, but didn't know where to start, couldn't afford a full AppSec team, and found existing tools either too scanner-focused or too training-focused to deliver lasting change. SafeStack is the platform she kept wishing existed while working with those teams.

SafeStack is angel-backed and headquartered in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter. The team is small by design — we believe a small, practitioner-led team can build something more useful than a large vendor who has never shipped production code.