The startup likely best known for the involvement of John Chambers as an investor changes its name from one with potential for controversy to one with absolutely none, and which has the advantage of being the name of their platform.
Ira Goldfarb, Chief Revenue Officer, Americas, Safe Security
If it’s good enough for Oracle, it’s good enough for Lucideus. The cybersecurity startup has decided to rebrand itself after its product, a strategy not uncommon in the IT industry, and used to best effect by Oracle, which started off as SDL before renaming itself after its database. Lucideus’ new name, Safe Security, takes its name from the company’s SAFE [Security Assessment Framework for Enterprises] platform, which was also used in the consumer SAFE Me app they launched at the end of last year.
Lucideus is probably best known in the IT industry for the involvement of former Cisco CEO John Chambers as an investor, during the company’s 2018 Series A funding round. Lucideus actually goes back to 2012, however, when they started as an Indian services company.
“For the first five years, we built a really solid reputation in pen testing and Red Team work,” said Ira Goldfarb, Chief Revenue Officer, Americas, at what is now Safe Security. “This included work for Indian operations of very large U.S. companies.” The company’s funding round was a part of their transition from a services company to a product company, as they began to commercialize the platform they had been using, and they started selling product aggressively in January 2020.
That product involves what the company calls Digital Business Risk Quantification, a version of what is more typically called risk management.
“In cybersecurity, there is no de facto standard like 5 star hotels for risk posture,” Goldfarb said. “We look at an entire organization, people, processes, policies and cyber policies, and provide an objective way of looking at them at a granular level, to see how secure they are. The score is the likelihood you will be breached in the next 12 months. We give actionable insights to reduce the likelihood of that, and help the organization minimize risk. We also have a simulation tool to assess the impact of changes that will be made.”
This is something that many of the largest companies in the world have tried to do themselves, Goldfarb said.
“We give an objective way to look at your organization in a consistent measurable way,” he stated. “We do it in real time, and from an inside out perspective, not outside in. We can look at every single asset in the organization. Many companies just look at this around the domain name, which is out-of-the-box stuff for us.”
Safe Security sells to very large customers. Their reach is further than that, however, which is where their channel comes in.
“Service providers and managed services providers package the product up to go downmarket,” Goldfarb said. “We don’t sell downmarket, but our partners do.”
The channel is also important because while Safe Security provides the data and the analysis to remediate the issues, their software doesn’t actually do that. Many of their partners do, however.
“Partners frequently have the capabilities to mitigate the issues,” Goldfarb noted. “We are heading towards a channel-led model. While we started direct in evangelical sales, we really need partners to scale. This is a very senior level sale. Partners like that because it’s a different conversation than selling email security. This opens up the opportunity for partners to be more relevant, and meshes well with their own services.”
Goldfarb said the name change wasn’t created by a problem with the old name. Lucideus is an acronym of Lucifer and Deus. Lucifer of course is the fallen angel who becomes Satan, and Deus is the Latin word for God. Goldfarb said the idea was to have a good over evil message, but it’s not inconceivable that someone might read it as Satan is God – not really the kind of message any mainstream vendor wants to articulate.
Goldfarb said that there were two much stronger dynamics in the name change, however.
“We were starting to become a product company, and Safe was the name of the product,” he stated. “We used it for our consumer version we released in December, and are also using it in our global expansion. It’s so much easier to marry the name to the product. That was the big driver.”
Goldfarb also said Safe is a simpler name, which has its advantages.
“It’s a way to create brand recognition more easily,” he said. “It also works well with partners who want to use the brand with their own offering.”
