Maryland cybersecurity company Strider Technologies has established a location in Utah and is looking to scale.
Following on the raise of a $10 million Series A round earlier this year, Strider has opened an office in South Jordan, Utah near Salt Lake City. This is the second physical location for Strider, a firm which specializes in helping companies keep their intellectual property (IP) safe from theft by foreign governments.
The company has a local presence in Fulton, and is a member of cyber-focused startup studio DataTribe.
Greg Levesque, CEO of Strider, said the company expects Utah to be an "important growth hub." The new location offers Strider direct access to a new highly skilled talent pool and potential hires coming out of local universities, such as Utah State University and Brigham Young University. Talent availability combined with the area's thriving tech ecosystem made the Salt Lake City metropolitan area the "next logical place to expand" beyond the Washington, D.C., region, he said.
Levesque declined to disclose Strider's current employee headcount, but said the company is looking to triple the size of its workforce across its two locations within the next six months.
Armed with its recently infused funds, the next phase of Strider's growth will be focused on rolling out the company's products to a wider group of customer firms, Levesque said. The company is especially targeting customers operating in the oil and gas, big tech and semiconductors spaces.
In addition, Levesque said Strider plans to begin looking at opportunities to expand its reach into Canada. One of the major investors in Strider's Series A was One9 Ventures based in Ottawa, Canada, which provides a connection to the new market.
Strider currently serves an undisclosed number of Fortune 150 companies in the U.S. Levesque declined to name any of the firm's customers, but characterized them as mostly "household brand names."
Strider serves its customers through a platform that uses machine learning and proprietary data sets to provide companies with risk intelligence, alerting them of ties to "risky" foreign government entities or programs designed to acquire talent and IP. Strider's data sets track information on millions of names and thousands of front organizations. The platform is intended to provide companies with the information they may need to protect themselves from foreign state-directed activity, including from China, Russia, Iran and other nation-states that may condone spying.
The company has continued to grow throughout 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Levesque said Strider has actually seen growth in interest in the kind of security services it offers. Several factors have contributed to a "rapid uptick" in insider incidents this year compared to last year, he said, and as a result, more companies seem to be realizing the importance of better safeguarding their IP.
Among the factors contributing to the increased interest in IP protection tech this year, Levesque cited mass layoffs and turbulent economic conditions at many companies. Employees who have lost their jobs during the pandemic may be inclined to want to steal a former employer's IP or may be susceptible to recruitment by bad actors, he explained. Companies are also looking to increase protections around their remote workers in recent months, Levesque said, who may be accessing sensitive company data and information from less secure environments.
