Why ForgePoint Capital is Placing Big Bets on Huntress Labs

According to recent reports, there are roughly 40,000 managed service providers (MSPs) and 28.8 million small to midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States alone. Small businesses make up 99 percent of the businesses that run America’s economy…so it’s really no surprise that they are a growing target for cybercriminals.

The 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that 43 percent of all cyberattacks were targeted at small businesses. Unfortunately, MSPs and SMBs cannot afford to spend a lot of money on complex cybersecurity platforms or endpoint threat detection tools with six-figure price tags, that are too complex to deploy and manage. Even if they are running antivirus and firewalls, those tools don’t do much for actual breach detection and response. The truth of the matter is, no one is immune to an attack, and those that have less resources will fare worse unless they have access to affordable solutions that can help thwart attacks.

To solve this problem, one of our newest portfolio companies, Huntress, has built an effective and affordable threat detection tool that is trusted by thousands of MSPs. Huntress was founded by three former NSA hackers, Kyle Hanslovan, Chris Bisnett, and John Ferrell, who have taken their offensive and defensive cyber skills to create a proactive threat hunting platform that helps MSPs and VARs obtain enterprise level protection at an affordable price. Going beyond typical preventive tools such as antivirus and firewalls, Huntress identifies “footholds,” where cybercriminals can lurk inside networks to cause major damage and provides easy to follow, step-by-step remediation recommendations to address threats. With its unique and innovative approach, Huntress is helping expand threat protection to the 99%, augmenting the effort of small security teams to allow for more sophisticated threat detection.

Huntress also has an impressive track record: they are deployed on nearly half a million endpoints with over 1k MSP partners and currently dominate the market as the premier cyber offering for MSPs. More importantly, Huntress has built an independent, trusted voice among MSPs, working tirelessly to protect them from cyber threats and share threat information among the MSP community to help them prevent future attacks. Huntress even identified one MSP for sale on the Dark Web recently and intervened to save the day.

In just the past two years, under Kyle, Chris, and Johns’ leadership, Huntress has been able to achieve triple digit growth. Today, our team at ForgePoint is excited to announce our partnership and $18 million investment in Huntress and I, along with Alberto Yépez, Co-Founder and Managing Director of ForgePoint, will be joining the company’s Board of Directors. We’re thrilled for Huntress and we look forward to watching the company continue to grow and be an outstanding partner, both through educating MSPs and the broader community and hunting down attackers.

View the press release for additional information.