Michael Shinn is the first to tell you that he's seen a lot of cybersecurity solutions try and fail in his more than 22 years in the industry.
Now, it's his turn to try, and, with customers like Texas Instruments and Century Link, it's easy to say that Shinn's business is doing pretty well.
Meet Atomicorp, a Chantilly, Va.-based cybercompany specializing in Docker container security solutions for Linux-based systems. The approximately 14-person company launched in 2015 and has raised a $1.1 million seed round in late 2016.
And it's this set-up that just last week attracted two former Mach37 leaders — Rick Gordon and Dan Woolley — to its ranks as a board member and formal advisor, respectively.
"The primary approach that everyone tries to use to solve this problem revolves around really smart and expensive cybersecurity people and that approach doesn't scale. For every three job openings in this industry, there's one qualified person for it," Shinn said.
“We decided that we needed to develop technologies and products that were built for people who didn’t know anything about cybersecurity and were still just as powerful as the other products out there."
Traditionally, Shinn said cybersecurity solutions were much more structured. Security protections could be put around things and government-approval blocks could be put on certain content — but that slows down systems and innovations. So, Shinn said, container security has started to become more attractive: "We have found that a lot of our customers are non-traditional cybersecurity buyers," he said.
"We certainly want to target the security organizations, but we're finding more and more that parts of the company that don't traditionally make security purchases – like the applications development groups or the server engineering groups – are buying cybersecurity solutions."
Atomicorp's technology is just built for the software of today: it's more customizable and flexible.
Before they hired their first sales person, Atomicorp had at least 1,000 customers. Today, they boast over 2,000, including the government of Hong Kong.
It shouldn't come as a surprise when you look at Shinn's track record. The first startup he founded exited so successfully in the early 2000s that he is still getting payments from the company that acquired them. Atomicorp is also fresh off of a stint in Mach37's cybersecurity accelerator in Herndon, Va.
"I believe pretty strongly in learning from experience," he said. "It's recruiting good people, and it's particularly hard for a cybersecurity startup to hire good people because this industry doesn't have a surplus of people who are trying to find a job."
Moving forward, they're weighing the options for a new round of funding. They're in a lucky position where they had customers and revenue pretty early on, but Shinn wants to make sure they keep moving forward with the momentum at the right time for them.
"What's important to us is that we have the right investors as partners and the right amount of capital to grow," he said. "If you have a great idea, you're going to have competitors, so if you want to grow, then you have to have the fuel to grow."
