A stealthy cybersecurity company with roots at Microsoft and the National Security Agency has tapped North Carolina for its East Coast hub – but not in Raleigh or Durham.
Cyemptive Technologies of Washington state, led by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) veteran Rob Pike, has tapped Wilson for its operation. Right now, it’s six people in a temporary 10,000-square-foot space at a customer’s office. But Pike said they're looking for a permanent space that will likely be bigger, as the plan is to grow the Wilson hub by about 100 people.
Pike declined to release customer names – though he did say “big” firms in the Triangle were on the list. Nor would he release a revenue figure, though he said it was in the high seven digits and that the firm is profitable.
He said the company picked Wilson due to its fiber network, as well as its proximity to military bases. Wilson is known throughout the South for its expertise in fiber. That's mainly because of Greenlight, the first community-owned, fiber-to-the-network home broadband service in North Carolina. First deployed in 2008, the service today offers access to broadband for every home and business within the Wilson city limits.
The company picking Wilson is another success for the eastern North Carolina community, which is trying to grow a local economy that was built on the back of the tobacco industry in the 20th century into one centered on a diversity of industries. Just this week, a company that makes lab-grown meat said it will build its first U.S. facility in Wilson.
Pike, who moved to the region about a year ago, said he’s bullish – both on the Triangle and the “disruptive” technology his firm is putting out, cybersecurity tools he said could change the industry.
“If you invented a hack 30 seconds ago, we will catch and learn and handle that hack within seconds or minutes, whereas much of the competition is struggling and the market is struggling because they’re stuck in learning time with their AI models,” he said. “We have AI, but we don’t use AI like everyone else.”
Pike said he’s been inventing since the age of 5 when his parents took him to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Canada.
“I was always an inventor,” he said. “I wanted to come up with the next biggest thing.”
That push led him to Microsoft and later Hitachi.
In 2014, he and his cohorts decided to go out on their own, bootstrapping Cyemptive into being.
“I knew it was the future of cyber right from the beginning,” he said.
The differentiator is speed – in how the technology can deal with hackers in “seconds” as opposed to solutions that can take weeks.
Pike teamed up with people like Jim Dubois, formerly chief information officer at Microsoft and NSA veteran Gary Zelanko.
Zelanko, the chief information security officer at the firm, is also located in the the Triangle.
The company is primarily bootstrapped, though it has raised money from friends and family, Pike said. Securities filings show it’s closed on about $5.9 million in capital since inception.
Today, the company is at about 100 people, primarily in Washington.