This month, cybersecurity company Thinkst celebrates its 10th anniversary since the launch of Canary, a layered product. The company debuted Canary after seeing companies spend millions of dollars on cybersecurity products, but it took more than a few months to realize they had been breached.
Thinkst believed that it could create digital tripwire products that could catch hackers with ACT.
Over the past decade, the company has grown to around 40 employees, primarily developers and engineers. They have not received external funds. And this year, we're on track to earn a healthy $20 million profit on almost double the annual recurring revenue since 2021, Thinkst founder Haroon Meer told TechCrunch.
When many cybersecurity companies are driven by fierce growth and speed and driven by venture capital, it is an impressive feat, if not exhilarating.
Meer, who founded Thinkst and served as the CEO of Cape Town, South Africa, told TechCrunch over a phone call earlier this month that he has done this so far by focusing on his customers and what he needs. Meer said the approach is working and refers to 60% of first-year clients who are still at the company today.
“We're not artificially hampering growth, but we're not doing the really stupid thing, “pour petrol into the fire,” says Meer. “All you have to do is keep the promises you make and you will grow into people that are right for you.”
In 2015, Thinkst launched a canary hardware product (an essentially a very early warning system named after the canary in the coal mine).
Because canary is set up like a honeypot, when you access a malicious hacker (or an approved pentester stress test for your company) you will be able to allow your company operations if you run into a Windows PC with open file shares or use customer data, secret API keys, or alerts to instantly compete for actions.
The purpose of canary is to reduce the time hackers have to sneak in on victims' networks, causing damage before causing engaging data, plant malware, or other damage. According to Verizon's latest annual data breach report, the average hacker has around 24 days on the victim's network before detection.
The company also offers canary tokens. For example, you can alert items of ostensible value that everyone is in a safe place, such as passwords, documents, credit card numbers, etc., when someone accesses or opens the item, the moment a safe place is at risk.
“One of the things that we've been wrongly lucky is that it's really hard to unfold canary mistakes,” Meer says. “If you fit it, you catch the attacker, and if you stick it out, you catch the attacker.” After all, if you see the advantage of a malicious hacker getting what you need faster, they'll get the opportunity.
“We rarely spend a week without receiving emails from customers who say this saved our lives. Or we went to a pen test. This is the only thing that caught an attacker,” says Meer.
According to Meer, these success stories will “fuel” the company and help drive the growth of the company's organic sales. Thinkst does not have an outbound sales team. Instead, the company relies primarily on word of mouth, or existing customers who want to buy more of the company's honeypot.
Meer said Thinkst has not received external funding so far, but he has not grouded gr into the VC industry and values its insights. Some companies admit that they can't get to where they are without a heavy cash injection, but he insists that money is “not a gate to stop you from doing things.” Meer said companies and customers that focus on making their products work are at the heart of happy businesses.
“My main thing is that you need to run your business in a way that is attractive to investments and acquisitions,” says Meer. “If you've built enough business so that you don't need enough business, you can always ask.”
Meer was not shy about his company's ambitions. “We think every company should be running at least five canaries right now,” he said. Some companies have a small number of canaries, some have more than hundreds of canaries. “There's a lot we can do to make more money. What we're doing now is to provide good products at fair prices and it's growing.”
“We're currently at $20 million, but I don't think $20 million is our ceiling,” Meer said.