CEO and founder of LimaCharlie: "We can be optimistic about the future if we all go together"

Hello friend,

My name is Maxime Lamothe-Brassard and I am the CEO and founder of LimaCharlie. 

I am writing this letter today to announce that LimaCharlie has raised 5.45 million dollars in an oversubscribed seed round led by Susa Ventures, with participation from Xerox Ventures, CoFound Partners, Long Journey Ventures, Sands Capital, StoneMill Ventures, as well as existing investor, Lytical Ventures. The money is going to be used to expand engineering and to build out our go-to-market strategy.

It has been quite the journey getting here. LimaCharlie started as an open-source project and has evolved into the commercial entity that it is today. When we initially set out, the probability that we would succeed in building the foundation for Security Infrastructure as a Service (SIaaS) was very close to zero. Cybersecurity is ripe for this change but our success has largely been predicated on the fact that we were naive enough to think we could do it.

LimaCharlie was created as a response to the state of security tooling in our industry. During my time as a security engineer, I have seen amazing advances in technology and watched the industry mature as a whole. The thing that has not changed during my career is the way that the tooling is locked up and bundled with services. The opaqueness of the security products on the market often creates scenarios where the consumers' only option is to trust that the vendor is doing all that they claim. 

Beyond the issue of trust, I regularly encounter people early in their careers that have never had any hands-on exposure to technologies, like EDR, which have become ubiquitous across the industry. The secrecy and “contact us for pricing” sales model endemic to the industry actually acts as a huge barrier to solving the talent shortage. This approach ensures that eager young cybersecurity enthusiasts can never get experience with the tools that they need to succeed in this industry. It is a chicken or egg problem for most people trying to land their first “real” job in cybersecurity. Fostering knowledge and innovation will only benefit us all in the long run. The current attitudes towards delivering solutions are heavily weighted toward vendor lock-in and ‘trust us you’re safe’ - most of what you see positioned as cybersecurity solutions are driven by capitalism and not what makes the most sense for cybersecurity professionals trying to engineer cost-efficient and scalable solutions.

At LimaCharlie we are not like other vendors. We are 100% a technology company and do not compete with the people and companies we provide tools and infrastructure for. We are vendor-neutral providers of tools and infrastructure for security professionals. We believe that this on-demand and engineering-centric approach is the way to move the industry forward. 

Thank you for joining us on this adventure. I encourage you to reach out to us on any channel and tell us about the problem you are trying to solve, any technical challenges you are facing, or even if you have an idea about how we could collaborate on something. I think we can be optimistic about the future if we all go together.

I hope you will join us.

Maxime Lamothe-Brassard,

CEO & Founder of LimaCharlie