The fear of the unknown can leave us feeling helpless, so if you’re an executive at a large company, getting hacked and losing valuable data probably gives you anxiety. Unless, of course, you have a strong cybersecurity arm that gives you peace of mind.
That’s where Secberus, a Miami-based cloud security startup that recently raised $6.6 million in seed funding, comes in.
While other companies may offer out-of-the-box security solutions, Secberus offers a scalable solution that provides coverage as the company grows. Another aspect of their “secret sauce” is that they offer a bird’s eye view of security across the entire company, a feature that other cybersecurity companies haven’t traditionally offered. Fausto Lendeborg, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told me that often cybersecurity aspects are seen in silos, making it difficult to truly secure the entire company.
The backstory
Lendeborg, a Miami native and a two-time founder (this is his second company) is a graduate of Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School. He started working early in life because he dropped out of college to pursue his dreams. “I’m probably 4-5 classes short of graduation,” he said. But that hasn’t stopped him from becoming a trailblazer in the cybersecurity space. The problem his company is solving today is a problem he identified while working for Prolexic around 2013 (now known as Akamai since its acquisition).
“My job was to protect the biggest banks in the world such as Bank of American and J.P. Morgan Chase,” Lendeborg said. “In my time at Prolexic, I fought 50,000 hacker incidents.”
He continued working at Akamai after the acquisition until he was recruited to be the co-founder of cybersecurity startup Zenedge. Zenedge was later acquired by Oracle in 2018 for an amount Fausto would not disclose.
He was a free agent again and started thinking back to the problem he encountered at Prolexic and other companies he later worked for.
“Enterprises need the ability to scale their cybersecurity as they grow and the lack of visibility of the entire infrastructure was a problem,” he said, explaining Secberus’ value proposition.
Here comes the money
To get Secberus off the ground, Lendeborg raised a pre-seed round of $525,000 in 2019 and brought on Everett Young as co-founder and COO. Young is also a start-up veteran, both for having founded an athletic data company in 2014 and then for working at the global accelerator: Startup Leadership Program (SLP). Lendeborg then brought on CTO heavyweight, Jason Hensley, his former colleague at Prolexic and former manager of software engineering at Chewy.com, a South Florida-based startup that was sold to Petsmart in 2017 for about $3 billion.
Secberus is pre-revenue at the moment, but the startup is in the process of closing its first large contracts, Lendeborg said.
The details
Co-founders: Fausto Lendeborg (CEO) and Everett Young (C))(
Website: www.secberus.com
Number of Employees: 19
Tagline: Gain confidence in the cloud
Financing: $6.6 million from 7 funders
Target Market: multi-national companies with more than 1,000 employees
Business model: not finalized
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