Successful entrepreneurship is often about seizing opportunities when presented. That is the case, according to two highly successful New Jersey entrepreneurs, Sameer Malhotra and Nazario Parsacala. They are the co-founders of Truefort, a cybersecurity firm based in Weehawken—part of a growing entrepreneurial tech ecosystem along the Jersey side of the Hudson River across from New York City.
Founded in 2015 Truefort came about as a result of the co-founders realizing that large companies had a major gap in their cyber security. The two IT executives identified this issue while working with banking leaders Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and Bank of America. At that time in the early 2010’s cyber attackers were aggressively targeting major banks for their data.
While fighting a particular data breach, the two IT executives found they had little information to fully understand and respond to the attack. That was eye opening to them given the millions of dollars that large companies were spending on security software.
Seeing both a challenge and an opportunity, the team focused on applications that large financial institutions rely upon, yet were not being protected. They then built their Zero Trust Platform that is based on patented behavioral analysis combined with machine intelligence. Their innovative solution now gives real-time application insight to enterprise security teams, while also providing security protection at scale.
Now six years later TrueFort announced this past week their closing of a $30M Series B round that will further advance its Zero Trust Platform.
“TrueFort addresses an unmet need for protecting modern applications and workloads with a purpose-built solution for enterprise security teams,” said Malhotra, CEO of TrueFort. “This new financing provides the resources we need to grow our footprint in existing markets, expand into new markets and support the accelerating adoption of our solution”.
Led by Shasta Ventures, the round included Canaan and prior investors: Evolution Equity Partners, Lytical Ventures and Emerald Development Managers. As part of the financing, Nitin Chopra, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, is joining the company’s board of directors.
“Customers see immediate value in understanding how applications should and should not behave, so they can implement a Zero Trust approach that significantly reduces business risk and prevents threats from becoming major security incidents.” said Chopra, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures.
The Series B round follows a very successful year for Truefort, having received both high market demand and industry recognition and accolades. Year-over-year bookings grew 650% with a 260% growth in ARR.
Most noteworthy is the company being selected as a 2021 finalist in the very prestigious Black Unicorn Awards that recognizes companies with the potential of becoming a unicorn—a future valuation of $1 billion. TrueFort was also named a Top 25 Cybersecurity Company, and a Red Herring North America Top 100 company.
The two former IT Wall Street executives join a growing number of successful New Jersey entrepreneurs who are in the entrepreneurial tech ecosystem that encompasses Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken along the Hudson River. In 2018 cryptocurrency startup Basis based in Hoboken, founded by three Princeton University graduates, raised $133 million. They are neighbor to text message marketing solution provider Attentive, a unicorn also in Hoboken.
In June New Jersey Governor Murphy gave the ecosystem his clear support via the NJ EDA signing an MOU with New Jersey City University (NJCU) to help create a Sports Wagering and Financial Technology Workforce Development and Innovation Center in Jersey City. This was recently followed by his administration releasing a summary of capital investment in the State showing venture capital flows in New Jersey had experienced 240% growth since 2018.
