Former NSA deputy director George Barnes has made his first funding as a enterprise capitalist for his new job on the VC incubation studio Purple Cell Companions. It’s a $3 million seed deal in an open supply cybersecurity startup known as Hunted Labs, he advised TechCrunch solely.
Barnes spent his whole 35-year profession on the spy company, beginning as an engineer, touring from comfortable assignments in locations like London to warfare zones, he stated. He labored as deputy director from 2017 to 2023.
Throughout that point, the “NSA had positioned itself to actually penetrate our adversaries,” he advised TechCrunch. That capacity to hack, “really prepares you to be a better defender,” he stated including that this is the reason the NSA is so good at “finding vulnerabilities and zero days.”
It’s additionally why he was excited to seek out Hunted Labs, the brainchild of Hayden Smith. Smith beforehand labored on DevOps and cybersecurity for numerous DoD initiatives; throughout his final challenge for the federal government, Smith was engaged on the DoD’s massive Platform One challenge, “which was this huge software factory,” as Smith advised TechCrunch.
Platform One permits the division’s programmers to deploy their apps quicker with fewer approvals largely through the use of already secured and cleared cloud or open supply software program (OSS). However one instant query got here up in its growth: Who’s scripting this OSS software program?
“We don’t know what connections they have to any organization or any foreign influence,” Smith stated. “There really was no product or no tool out there that could help accomplish this at scale.”
Chilly e mail, massive buyer
The significance of figuring out software program contributors grew to become highlighted in 2024, when a lone Microsoft engineer found a backdoor in XZ Utils, a broadly used piece of software program included in nearly each model of Linux. The perpetrator spent years gaining belief and masking their tracks earlier than planting this code.
Smith needed to create a industrial model of the background checking work he did for Platform One. So he despatched chilly emails to potential buyers, and Barnes replied. Smith was shocked to find he’d reached the previous NSA deputy director.
Barnes favored the thought sufficient to ask Hunted Labs into Purple Cell’s paid, three-month “discovery” interval for its incubator. An incubator is considerably like an accelerator, solely the VC is extra like a co-founder, bringing the outfit’s personal concepts for startups to life.
Such offers could contain taking a bigger stake than in a normal seed deal, but it surely affords extra mentorship and assist. Purple Cell declined to say how a lot of Hunted Labs it controls.
In that three months, Hunted Labs refined its product sufficient to land clients and its $3 million seed funding from Purple Cell. The startup has additionally already landed a $1.79 million contract with the Area Growth Company, Smith stated.
Apparently, the area company deal didn’t come from Purple Cell’s community. It got here as an alternative from the DoD connections of Smith and former DoD challenge safety engineer Tim Barone, who beforehand labored with Smith and is a co-founder of Hunted Labs, together with Smith’s spouse Amanda Aguayo. (“I have a cooling off period — that’s two years for DoD,” stated Barnes, referring to why he isn’t instantly concerned in gross sales.)
However the founders are recognized to many within the huge division, so in contrast to many Silicon Valley-born protection tech startups, they don’t want such heat intros to authorities consumers, anyway.
“They are recognized professionals in their own right, and so that actually opens doors,” Barnes stated.
Hunted Labs additionally offers extra conventional OSS software program menace administration, like figuring out the software program in use and recognizing vulnerabilities within the code. On this area, it has loads of competitors, like Black Duck Software program, Mend.io, and Snyk.
