Former NSA Deputy Director George Burns is making his first venture capitalist investment for his new job at VC Incubation Studio Red Cell Partner. This is a $3 million seed deal for an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunted Labs.
Burns began his entire 35-year career at Spy Agency as an engineer, travelling from flexible challenges to war zones in places like London, he said. He worked as assistant director from 2017 to 2023.
Meanwhile, “The NSA was actually positioned to permeate our enemies,” he told TechCrunch. The ability to hack “really prepare you to become a better defender” said that this is why the NSA is “so good at finding days of vulnerabilities and zero.”
That's why he was excited to find the hunting lab, the brainchild of Hayden Smith. Smith previously worked on DevOps and cybersecurity for various DOD projects. In his last project for the government, Smith was working on DoD's Big Platform One project, “This was this huge software factory,” as Smith told TechCrunch.
Platform 1 allows departmental programmers to deploy apps faster with fewer approvals, with less approvals, by using already securely cleared cloud or open source software (OSS). But in its development, who is writing this OSS software?
“I don't know what organizations and foreign influence they have,” Smith said. “We didn't have any products or tools to help us achieve this on a large scale.”
Former NSA Deputy Director George Burns, currently Cyber President of Red Cell Partners Credit: Red Cell Partner
Cold email, big customers
The importance of knowing software contributors was highlighted in 2024. This was highlighted when only Microsoft engineers discovered the backdoor of XZ Utils, a widely used software included in almost every version of Linux. The assailants gained trust for years and covered the track before planting this code.
Smith wanted to create a commercial version of the background checking work he did on Platform 1. So he cold emailed potential investors, and Burns replied. Smith was shocked to find out he had arrived at the former NSA Deputy Director.
Barnes loved the idea enough to invite Hunted Labs to Red Cell's salary, a three-month “discovery” period. The incubator is somewhat of accelerator, with only the VC being the co-founder, bringing the costumes themselves ideas for startups.
Such transactions include taking larger stocks than standard seed transactions, but provide more mentorship and support. Redsell refused to say how much it hunts.
Over the three months, Hunted Labs refined enough products to land customers and $3 million seed investment from Red Cell. The startup has also already landed a $1.79 million contract with the Space Development Agency, Smith said.
Interestingly, the space agency contract was not from Red Cell's network. Instead, it came from the DOD connection between Smith and former DOD project security engineer Tim Barone. He previously worked with Smith and was the co-founder of Hunted Labs along with Smith's wife, Amanda Aguyo. (“I have an off period – that's two years for DOD,” Burns said.
The agreement was an award from the AFWERX program as part of a program that funds research agreements with small and medium-sized businesses. However, the founders are known to many in their large sectors, so unlike many Silicon Valley-born defense technology startups, government buyers don't need such a warm introduction anyway.
“They are recognized experts in their own right, so they actually open the door,” Burns said.
Hunted Labs also offers traditional OSS software threat management, such as identifying software in use and discovering code vulnerabilities. There is a lot of competition in this area, including Black Duck Software, Mend.io, Snyk, and more.