Why We Raised Our Series A

You may have heard that Red Canary recently raised $6 million in Series A funding. This is an exciting milestone for our company, customers, and investors. I thought it would be a good idea to write a quick blog post explaining the raise, why we did it, and what it means for the future of Red Canary.

About the Raise

Access Venture Partners and Noro-Moseley Partners co-led the Series A round and were joined by return investor Kyrus. We chose Access and Noro-Moseley because of the amazing alignment between their priorities, goals, and expertise with Red Canary’s plans and needs.

They bring legit credentials in the cyber security arena from investments in great companies like SecureWorks, AlertLogic, and LogRythym. They bring extensive networks that provide us massive value in recruiting top talent and solidifying new partnerships. They believe in building companies the right way for the long haul, not making a quick buck. We feel extremely fortunate to team up with investors that share similiar values as Red Canary and bring the expertise to support us as we continue our growth.

Why we did it

From a financial standpoint Red Canary didn’t need to raise money. We have been cash flow positive for a while now and take great pride in being “customer funded” after building the company with our seed round from Kyrus (original investor in Carbon Black). Our growth curve is steep and we’ve exceeded every goal we set for 2016. Our platform is mature, stable, and exceptionally powerful. Every day our service makes security better for a diverse group of customers all over the world.

So why do it?

I talk to customers and prospects every day. Two things stand out:

1. they need help
2. they are being sold “silver bullets” that fail to make their security any better

We’re not ok with this. We’re not ok with companies picking products and services based on over-the-top marketing, flashy but unusable UIs, and empty promises from pushy sales reps and “trusted advisors.”

Don’t get me wrong, Red Canary is not a silver bullet either. We won’t solve every information security problem you have. We’ll never claim we detect 100% of anything (run away screaming from anyone who does). We’re obsessed with making security better for organizations, but we are just a piece of the puzzle and we’ll gladly tell you where we fit.

Red Canary is making security better for our customers. We have the data to prove it and are happy to show you. We want to do this for as many companies as we can without compromising the quality of what we provide our customers. At the end of the day that is why we raised this money. Companies need better security and they need solutions that work. With this capital and new partners we’ll be able to expand our reach and do more to accomplish our mission.

The future of Red Canary

So what are we going to do with the money? I’m glad you asked.

The first order of business is expanding our team in several critical areas. Our sales team is primed for expansion to keep up with market demand. I would put our SOC team up against any on Earth when it comes to endpoint analysis and we will continue to expand the team to make sure we have exceptional depth. Red Canary Technical Account Managers provide unparalleled value to our customers and we need more of them to make sure every customer’s security continues to get better.

There are areas of our product where we are just scratching the surface in terms of the value we can deliver. As the CTO, I’m extremely excited to expand our engineering team and get to work implementing some of the crazy ideas we’ve got ahead of us. We deliver new features fast and I can’t wait to see what Red Canary can do a year from now.

We will be ramping up our marketing efforts to expand our reach and make more companies aware of what we can do to help them. More events, more media, more of everything. We are going to aggressively get the word out while taking dead aim at our competitors and their dubious silver-bulletness.

There is a lot more I could write but it is time to start putting this money to work bringing better security to every organization…