Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Hey Carol, thanks so much for joining us.
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
Thank you very much for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm really excited to talk to you because we're going to talk about one of the fastest growing security companies in the dev ops space. So let's talk about GitGuardian so what does the company do.
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
So GitGuardia is a cybersecurity solution. For the DevOps regeneration, that's our baseline kind of, we provide solution for code security. So looking at our core businesses, looking at what we call secrets in the code. So secrets are anything like an API key, for example. And we have a very strong detector system and remediation, because obviously, detecting is now a commodity, but remediation can get very complex in organization with a lot of developers.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's the background story of the company? How did it all come to fruition?
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
So it's a bit of a funny story in a way. So we have two, two young engineers just out of school, and they have created their company, and they have this background project where they are looking at GitHub. And when, they fall by accident on on a public key of a very large company, US aerospace, and they say, Oh, my God, this is not possible. Is that true, we found this API key that could access database from this company. And they realized by extending their secret detection, that actually they were already a lot of keys on public GitHub, and they further search and find a good volume. So based on this research, we do that repeated research every year. And we have a report called the state of secret sprawl that we issue every year on in March. And if you look at the 2023 report, looking at 20 to 2022 numbers, we found 10 million secrets on public GitHub, and unique secrets. And that's massive. And I can tell you already, without giving you the exact number, that 2023 numbers are going to be even higher, because code is getting bigger. Secret sprawl is getting bigger, at the same time, in a way.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yeah. And that's what I was picking up when I was learning more about GitGuardian, this is a problem that's only growing. So companies obviously need to solve this growing problem. And it's a platform that can be used by all types of companies from a really early stage startup to large, very, very large enterprises.
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
Exactly, we do offer the solution for free for individual developers and company below 25 developers, because we believe that it's, you know, helping the community with being safer in developing code. So that's why we offer this and above 26, we have, of course, a business and enterprise version of the software. And the features are very complete, even for the free version, you know, it's not a downgraded version. Of course, when you go up, you get more capacity in terms, of course, for API or stuff like that, but feature wise, the free version is already very, very complete. And, and we offer this to all size of company, because basically, as soon as you develop software you may have I mean, you have the problem, right. And the more developers you have, the more complex the problem is because the more people collaborate on code and have to undo mistake. And it's not just like you have senior developers, they never do the mistake, because everybody does the mistake once. And sometimes it can be really critical. I mean, there have been some breaches you may have seen on our blog, but Uber, Twitter, I mean, big companies have been breached through that type of leakage of, you know, secrets. So it's really important to cover this. And as I said that detection is really the big piece, but it's not the most important one. Once you've detected you need to remediate and remediate means you need to rotate your secret, you need to put it in the in the right, you know, in a secret manager or in a dot env file. But when you do so, if you're working, if multiple people are working on the same application, you may block you know, production systems, so remediating is not just you on your, you know, a little laptop is involving is collaborating. And the bigger the team are, the more complex remediation is. That's why you need a platform such as GitGuardia.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yeah, that makes sense. Because it's not just the detections, the remediation that can be a really, really big problem to solve. So make sense? So what's the current details on the company?
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
So we are 130 People were French, or, you know, by creation, the r&d is in France. But we have now a bigger sales and marketing team in the US. Boston based and obviously we have some people West Coast and everywhere but the the offices in Boston we opened back in September. So this is quite new for us. But what's orginal in a way is that we have 80% of our revenue, and our customers are in fact, in the US, even if we were in France, until very recently, we've been able to sell to a very, very large company. I mean, we have massive reference, and our biggest customer is is 10k developers. It's a huge American telco, we also have a huge American, I would say software techno company, another nine or 10k developers, so we are able to sell to these enterprise American accounts. And yeah, 80% of our revenue is now in the US. So that's our origin ability in a way being French.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yes. And that yeah, the Boston office is exciting. So what's the plan in terms of growth as far as hiring for the year?
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
So we are going to hire I mean, we are three Series C. So we've raised our series B, November 20. Let me not forget 20 to 21. Now I forgot 21. And seriously this year, so we expect to raise you know, before the summer or something like that. So obviously, once we raise, we are going to accelerate again. We hired last year, so 2023, we hired 80 people. So you see that this year, if we raise another series, it will it will be another you know that type of growth again, so we expect to probably finish around 200 or something like that, at least, and then accelerate in 2025. So that's a good volume. And in terms of who are we hiring we are in the US majority of the teams are CSM. So customer success, sales and marketing. And for for the French market. It's more engineers. But in the US, we also hire sales engineers and a solutions engineers to support the Salesforce. But as for development, purely development, it's it's in the Paris office.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Got it? Okay, so what's the culture like at GitGuardia, what's it like working there.
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
So we are an engineering company in a way. So we have very technical people in the team. Even in marketing, most of my team are have developer or DevOps or engineer background, which is a bit strange sometimes when you think about it, but I'm difficult to find because I need to find, you know, developers or engineers that like to sell and like to write and like to be on videos and stuff, which is not always easy. But we have them. And so the culture is very much on, you know, technical things, but also doing a greater good for the community. When I said, you know, we are offering the solution, we have also something that was at the start of the company, when you when you asked about the origin, which is called the pro bono alerting where basically when we find secrets on public GitHub, because we monitor public GitHub, we tell people so as if we were finding your keys on the street, we would say you you lost your keys, we do the same we sell we send an email to any person, even if they don't use GitGuardia, we send them an email saying, We found your API key or your password on the public GitHub, did you want to do that, and sometimes it's a test key, but most of the cases, they really didn't want to do that. And they thank us. And you know, so that's something that is important in our culture, that we think with the solution we can help, you know, code being more and more secure environment for developers.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So now, regardless of economic conditions, top tier talent, they always have options. So why should GitGuardia be on the radar for job seekers?
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
So I think, well, first the product as I said, it's it's very interesting to work on we are looking into adding Of course I mean, it's it's everybody tells that but artificial intelligence is going to be embedded into the product to give more context to give more help for remediation to assist with Basically our customers. So there is really a lot of nice things that are becoming reality into the product, we have built a data team that is very also powerful, and the best engineers in the market are working on this. So product is really key. Second traction market traction, if I'm thinking about the US market more specifically, and sales profiles and everything, we have a great market traction, the market is booming. And we have a lot of, you know, demand and we are very much a proven solution adopted by large accounts. So we don't need to, you know, find our next, you know, big customer, we have that, right. So we are able to demonstrate the value and have already a big installed base with with with proof of the solution bringing value. So that's the second thing. The third thing I think is for an American, I would say, talent, it's we are French, and this has some advantages in the way we see people. And the way we treat people. In the day to day work, I would say we value transparency, we value feedback from bottom up. So we want people to voice their concerns, voice, their vision, come up with, you know, ideas and solutions and be critical, which is maybe different from what they're used to. We value time, job and personal time balance very much. We love our food and we we onboard people in France for one to two weeks. So usually they love coming to Paris for that. So that's another you know, little thing that makes it makes us different. Yeah, and the team is really very solid. And even if you know 130 is already you know, a big team, I joined when we were a bit less than 30. So for me, it's it's becoming big. It's still a very connected, we know everyone and we have big connection one to another. So it's very international. Also, I think in my team marketing, we have 12 nationalities. So that's also very interesting.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities that GitGuardia you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their listings there. And this is a company as Carol said, that has product market fit a problem that's only growing and they have the leading platform to help counteract this problem, a great customer list. So there's a whole plethora of reasons of why this should be on your radar. So go to their company page, which is venturefizz.com/gitguardian for all their job openings. Carol, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Carol Winqwist, GitGuardian
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
