The idea for developing a cyber security subscription service that combines the best of both the software and human analyst worlds stems from the co-founders backgrounds.

“The three of us co-founders come from two very different worlds that actually, turns out are quite similar. My CTO, Chris Rothe, and I worked on satellite based processing systems here in Colorado. You collect a massive amount of data from overhead satellites that you then pick through with technology to identify what is potentially interesting. From there, these potentially interesting events need to be looked at by an expert analyst. Our third co-founder, CSO, Keith McCammon, built the security programs for large defense contractors. He has very, very deep security experience. When you combine those two worlds you get Red Canary: a solution that analyzes a massive amount of data to surface potentially threatening cyber-attacks that are then reviewed by one of our expert analysts.”

Unfortunately, even mid-sized companies are targets for cybersecurity threats, yet most are unprepared according to Beyer. How many of these company leaders are aware of ransomeware, for example? “If I had asked that question 12 months ago I would have gotten blank stares. Right now, everybody knows either they’ve been hit with it, one of their peers has been hit with it or one of their relatives has been hit with it. My mom actually got hit with it at her business probably about a month ago. And that’s a 10-person timber, forestry, and management company up in Michigan. So it does not discriminate in who they target.”

Beyer’s journey to cybersecurity entrepreneur is anything but conventional. He grew up on the eastern shores of Wisconsin and then northern Michigan. “When you grow up in a town of about 3,000 people in Northern Michigan, turns out I had no idea that computer science was a thing. When I went to school I ended up going to Purdue because they had an exceptionally good industrial engineering program.”

Beyer grew up amidst the family business and understood risk-taking.  “My grandfather graduated high school and ended up buying a semi-truck and hauling timber across Northern Michigan. He was so successful at that he ended up turning that into a trucking company and then realized it made a lot of sense to start a timber and forestry management company as well.”