Brian Carbaugh

So if they asked that question five or six years ago, AI just wasn't there, right, to be able to move at speed and scale.

But we're at a new point.

We're at, I think, an inflection point infusing new technology with the right type of approach to optimize a human being.

So the roots of the company stem from folks who are defending some of the most targeted organizations in the world saying, we need help.

The light is blinking red in terms of our overall sort of

ability to do what we feel like we need to do to counter the threat.

So we went back to Red Cell and I sat down with Grant and started making some phone calls, phone a friend, some people who were really thought leaders and experienced in the space like Billy McMillan, who is our chief product officer, who at the time was functionally the deputy CISO at Salesforce.

He had been the chief information security officer

At CIA, Billy had been someone like me who served on the Directorate of Operations side within CIA and had what he describes as a digital conversion about halfway through his career and really started taking on, aggressively taking on driving and leading CIA cyber operations from offense to defense.

So I reached out to Billy when he was still at Salesforce and started to lay out for him what we were considering and an approach, strategizing different types of approaches we could take.

He's a lifelong friend of mine.

We went to college together and was thrilled when Billy came over, joined Andesite as, I think, employee number three or employee number four as our chief product officer.

And it was really then that with Billy on board, Alex Thamen, who was our chief architect at the time, who's our chief technology officer now,

Billy and Alex really started product visioning, pushing this thing forward again with its core idea, the genesis being we've now seen and heard from government sector teammates that they've got workforce issues, they're struggling to keep up, they've got siloed data, they've got context challenges, a context tax essentially where

You're losing the sort of crux of the issue you're investigating just through all of the different screens you have to toggle through.

And then we were hearing the same thing from teammates in the commercial sector.

So we looked at it and said, there's a broad problem.

It's pervasive.

It's in government and in commercial space.

Let's build a team that is in itself diverse and takes a broad approach, but an aggressive approach to not.