Salem Cyber
Name: Trevor Gingras
Company: Salem Cyber
Email: [email protected]
Management
Jon Bagg, CEO: ~10 years in Cyber serving large enterprises
Trevor Gingras, COO: ~11 years growing companies, leading businesses, & MBA
Key Advisors/Board Members
Tony Gaidhane: Cyber Vendor Exec. serving same target market
Ed Bellis: Exited Cyber Entrepreneur w/ similar story
Enoch Long: Cyber Team Leader at archetypal enterprise target
Bill Barnes: Cyber Team Leader at archetypal enterprise target
Steve Greenbacker: Cyber Vendor Exec. serving same target market
Kate Hartshorn: Cyber Legal Exec.
Nick Harrison: Marketing Leader
Bob Gingras: B2B Sales Leader
Tony DiBianca: Exited Technology Entrepreneur (Winston Starts mentor)
Industry
Cybersecurity
Year Founded
2021
Number of Employees
6 FTEs: 4 employees + 2 contractors
Current Investors
Bootstrapped + $250K family & friend round in May 2022
Monthly Burn Rate
$40K
Financing Sought
$550K
Use of Funds
54% Product Development
12% Commercial
7% Operations / Other
3% Existing Debt
24% Buffer for Future Decisions
Business Description
Salem Cyber represents business model innovation for cybersecurity operations.
We build software that helps enterprise cybersecurity teams detect more threats.
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.
Current approaches do not solve the problem:
resource increases only increase capacity linearly and resources are constrained
outsourcing to Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) only shifts the problem elsewhere
big data only finds pattern-breaking anomalies and lack local context
Products/Services
Our product, Salem, automatically reviews and prioritizes cyber alerts.
Salem investigates all alerts, including the noise, escalating the more relevant threats to a client’s cyber team.
We improve cyber teams’ effectiveness by increasing alert coverage and enabling their time to be used more efficiently.
Technologies/Special Know-how
Salem uses machine learning techniques to scale the impact of human knowledge.
Our seasoned cybersecurity analysts train Salem centrally on industry threat context.
Salem learns institutional context directly from a client’s cybersecurity team, documenting the oral history in a structured way for the 1st time.
Salem applies this context at machine scale, investigating a practically unlimited number of alerts.
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 (or their MSSPs) 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.
We expect more direct competition in time, so we’re focused on continuing to quickly develop a high-fidelity product with strong evidence of solving the problem.
Business Model and Distribution Channels
We sell directly to enterprises and MSSPs.
We have secured 2 enterprise pilots (a Fortune 100 firm and a Forbes 2000 firm) and are closing one with an MSSP soon.
Cybersecurity is highly community-driven, so we use direct sales (founder-led), partnerships (e.g., Microsoft), and community tools to drive referral network effects and connect with new targets.
We offer subscription and usage-based pricing models to meet various customer use cases.