Susa Ventures is excited to announce our investment in LimaCharlie, a remote-first company that offers security infrastructure as a service. We led the round, with participation from Sands Capital, Long Journey, SNR.vc, CoFound Partners, and many other great investors. We’re thrilled to welcome Maxime and the rest of the LimaCharlie team to the Susa Family.

Maxime Lamothe-Brassard, Founder of LimaCharlie

When I started my career as an early engineer at LinkedIn almost 20 years ago, we bought our own servers, installed them in a local data center, and purchased expensive licenses for black box products like Oracle. By the time I made a transition to venture capital a decade later, AWS and cloud infrastructure were taking over, and an increasing portion of the software stack was open source or API-based. This IT infrastructure shift led to large productivity gains for companies: now instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront for machines, software, and IT staff, you can be up and running in minutes in the cloud for a reasonable usage-based fee.

Throughout my investing career, I’ve been looking for other sectors that are primed for their own AWS-like revolutions. The mix of cloud-based software, usage-based pricing, and a high degree of customizability and transparency is very powerful. Our investments in companies like Mux (video infrastructure APIs) and Treasury Prime (bank infrastructure APIs) fall into this category.

With this lens in mind, I am extremely excited to announce our investment in LimaCharlie. LimaCharlie provides security infrastructure as a service. Effectively, they are building for security teams what Amazon/AWS built for IT teams. Instead of paying large upfront fees for heavyweight black box solutions, LimaCharlie offers a collection of lightweight, best-in-class security primitives for EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), and other core parts of the modern security stack. This platform is powerful enough to be used by a wide array of customers including: 1) companies that want to build new security solutions on top of a rich abstraction layer instead of from scratch, 2) MSSPs that want to quickly customize security offerings for their clients and 3) sophisticated enterprises like Carta and Snap that require powerful and flexible tooling.

LimaCharlie’s CEO, Maxime Lamothe-Brassard, is the ideal person to launch this company. He spent years working at Canada’s version of the NSA before becoming one of the earliest employees at CrowdStrike (a $35b security company). He then worked at Google, where he was on the founding team of Google X’s Chronicle Security project. He has seen security software and challenges from every vantage point, which carries through to the platform that LimaCharlie has developed. The APIs are intuitive, making it easy to set up rules, and to detect and address security issues in real-time. Speed was actually a point that every customer we talked to brought up: LimaCharlie is fast. For example, other EDR tools process events in minutes while LimaCharlie’s EDR operates at wire speed. This lack of lag is critical with modern security challenges like ransomware proliferation, where every second counts.

Our view at Susa is that cybersecurity tools are going to become increasingly critical over the next few years, with increased attacks from hackers as well as state actors. LimaCharlie has the potential to transform how security products are built, and to accelerate innovation and development in this space. We’re incredibly excited to be working with Maxime and the rest of the team.

Our Investment in LimaCharlie was originally published in Susa Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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