Salem Cyber

Contact: Jon Bagg, CEO
Address: 500 West 5th Street Suite 400, Winston-Salem, NC 27101
Phone: (336) 750-6542
Email: [email protected]
Website: salemcyber.com

Management

Jon Bagg, CEO: ~11 years in Cyber serving target customer segment

Trevor Gingras, COO: ~13 years growing companies, leading businesses, & MBA

Key Advisors/Board Members

Board: Chris McGowan

Active Advisors:

Tony Gaidhane
Ed Bellis
Enoch Long
Steve Greenbacker
Kate Hartshorn

Industry

Cybersecurity

Year Founded

2021

Number of Employees

FT: 7 (5 employees + 2 contactors)

PT: 1 contractor

Current Investors

Bootstrapped + $850K in family & friend equity rounds

Monthly Burn Rate

$70K

Financing Sought

$4M

Use of Funds

35% Product
30% GTM
16% Security
15% BizOps
4% Existing Debt

Business Description

Our product, Salem, is an AI decision intelligence platform that investigates cyber alerts to surface the few that require human attention.

Company Background

As a cybersecurity analyst & engineer, Jon experienced the problem first-hand and found no traditional business model nor technology effectively solved the problem. He had an idea for a novel approach to solving the problem and created Salem Cyber to bring the idea to life.

Problem/Solution

Cybersecurity has an effectiveness problem – despite $300B+ in annual global cyber spend, cyber teams only have the resources to investigate critical cyber alerts with the remainder (90%+) going uninvestigated and deemed ‘noise’. Hackers know this and threats can hide in the noise. Moreover, analysts are overwhelmed by the volume of alerts and develop alert fatigue from the repetitive and manual nature of investigations.

Products/Services

Salem helps cyber teams identify more threats faster. Salem does so by investigating all alerts (including the noise) like a cyber analyst, and then escalates the ones most likely to represent threats to a client’s cyber team.

Salem helped our launch customer achieve their objective of reducing their mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) threats. Prior to Salem, their MTTD was 48 minutes. With Salem, it is 3 minutes.

Technologies/Special Know-how

We are in the process of converting our provisional patent around our process of using machine learning techniques to scale the impact of human knowledge. This process involves 1) our seasoned cybersecurity analysts training Salem centrally on industry threat context, and 2) Salem learning institutional context directly from a client’s cyber team, structuring their wisdom for repeatable application.

Markets

Cybersecurity is a massive ($300B+ global spend) and growing (13%+ CAGR to ’27) market. The problem we’re solving is pervasive across industry, geography, company size, and organizational cyber maturity. We are first targeting US-based enterprises with a focus on healthcare, financial services, and retail firms with locally based teams.

Competition

Established cyber tech players with access to more data and resources could replicate our ‘investigate every alert’ approach. However, they typically view data as the sole answer. We view institutional context as being critical too, and that context resides with humans.

Since ChatGPT launched, we’ve seen the emergence of LLM-based cyber assistants that co-pilot junior analysts through a single alert investigation but are unable to decide on which alerts represent threats.

Business Model and Distribution Channels

Cybersecurity is highly community-driven, so we’ve sold our subscription-based software directly to enterprises thus far. We have a Fortune 100 customer (contracting for $48K ARR) and are closing in on more. Also, we’re exploring partnerships with Microsoft and certain Consulting firms, MSSPs, and VARs to accelerate.