ThreatConnect is a company you may not be familiar with today, but I predict that many more will soon know their brand, product and CEO Adam Vincent in the coming year.
A source with knowledge of the company's finances previously told DC Inno that ThreatConnect's valuation is in the ballpark of $200 million. In an interview with DC Inno, Vincent declined to comment on ThreatConnect's valuation when asked if it exceeds $150 million, but between a coy smile he said "it's pretty awesome ... we're probably talking to the same people."
Founded in 2011 from a living room in Maryland, ThreatConnect is now a 100-person cybersecurity firm that plans to double its workforce over the next 12 months and vastly expand its real estate footprint by taking additional floors in its current office building. Roughly 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies are clients of ThreatConnect, Vincent said, in addition to 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies. In the fourth quarter of 2015 alone, ThreatConnect scooped ten Fortune 500 clients.
At the moment, roughly 50 percent of ThreatConnect's workforce is based in northern Virginia. The remainder of employees work from either home or a series of satellite offices.
On Tuesday, ThreatConnect announced the launch of what it calls the latest version of the only "true" threat intelligence platform (TIP), called ThreatConnect 4.0.
Threat Intelli..what?
Navigating the complex, highly technical cybersecurity market is a difficult task. Beyond the larger industry, there are also smaller subsegments, with their own speciality technology, worth millions. Each are attracting savvy investors from across the globe for the role they play in the larger battle against scammers, hackers and automated network attacks.
Among this specialized cyber corridor of businesses, you'll find end point and device-specific security companies, cyber forensics and detection monitoring brands, among others, while an overarching niche called Threat Intelligence Platform (TIPs) acts as a sort of centralized, OS-like dashboard for all.
Liftoff
The freshly updated system (ThreatConnect 4.0) "offers customized reporting cater[ed] to directors and the C-suite, making it easy for these stakeholders to evaluate threat intelligence," the company wrote in a press release.
What this translates into is an innovative piece of software, located either in the cloud or on-premise with a client, that organizes streams of possible cyberattack threat data, making it more useable and actionable for security analysts tasked with defending their employer. The dashboard approach also importantly makes threat data generally easier to understand—serving as an educational tool for some executives and even students enrolled in cybersecurity programs.
Vincent, along with former IT security consultants and ThreatConnect co-founders Richard Barger and Andrew Pendergast, explained that the strength in ThreatConnect's valuable software, among other things, can be found in its vibrant user base—which is split between freemium and paying enterprise customers.
"We approached customer/user acquisition sort of like the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world"
Rather uniquely, ThreatConnect has constructed a sort of quasi-forum for native discussion focused on their product. The forum provides an avenue for feedback and other information about the types of threats that users most often face and what new features would be most helpful in the battle against hackers. User's contributing within the forum can post comments anonymously if they prefer, providing another layer of threat intelligence.
But the threat forum, and it's actual functionality, may only be worthwhile today because of the team's early decision to employ a freemium-centric option. For reference, ThreatConnect's freemium service is available on a limited basis, with a cap of three users per organization.
Freemium accounts are not restricted when it comes to analysis tools or data aggregation features, instead the only limitation comes in the form of total accounts—similar in nature to Slack. At the moment, there are roughly 7,000 freemium users engaged with ThreatConnect, Vincent told DC Inno. In contrast, ThreatConnect boasts approximately 50 enterprise clients (organizations), with thousands of unlimited accounts.
During our interview, Vincent credited ThreatConnect's ability to convert freemium accounts into subscribers for the huge, aforementioned valuation. And it is this very conversion rate that also positions the company to reach new growth goals in 2016.
The truth is: the deployment of a freemium service, and then the leveraging of related data-driven information to help build a stronger product is un-revolutionary when it comes to the broader tech industry—companies like Facebook and Instagram, for example, were established upon a wealth of freemium user generated content. With that being said, this feedback structure in the cybersecurity TIP sector offers a supremely intuitive proposition.
"From the start, we approached customer/user acquisition sort of like the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world rather than as a traditional security company," Vincent told DC Inno.
