Former NSA deputy director George Barnes invests as a venture capitalist for the first time in VC Infubation Studio’s new job Red blood cell partner. This is a $3 million seed deal in an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunting laboratoryhe specifically told TechCrunch.
He said Barnes spent a full 35 years in the Spy Agency, starting with an engineer and heading to the war zone from a comfortable mission in a place like London. He served as deputy director from 2017 to 2023.
During this time, he told TechCrunch, “NSA has been positioned to really penetrate our opponents.” He said the ability to invade is “really making you a better defender,” he added, which is why NSA is so good In “Find Vulnerability and Zero Days”.
That’s why he was happy to find Hayden Smith’s creative hunting lab. Smith has previously worked on various DOD projects in DevOps and cybersecurity work. In the government’s last project, Smith is studying the Department of Defense’s large-scale Platform One As Smith told TechCrunch, the project “is this huge software factory.”
Platform ONE allows programmers in the department to deploy their applications faster by using most of the approvals of existing secure and cleaned cloud or open source software (OSS). But it raises a straightforward question in its development: Who is writing this OSS software?
“We don’t know what connections they have with any organization or any foreign influence,” Smith said. “There is really no product, and there are no tools that can help do this on a large scale.”
Cold email, big customers
Understanding the importance of software contributors is highlighted in 2024, when a lonely Microsoft engineer was XZ UTILSalmost every version of Linux contains widely used software. Perpetrator It took a few years Get trust and cover their tracks before planting this code.
Smith wanted to create a commercial version of the background checking work he did for Platform One. So he sent a cold email to potential investors, Barnes replied. Smith was shocked to find that he had arrived at the former deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Barnes loved the idea very much and could invite the Hunting Lab into Red Cell’s salary, a three-month “discovery” period. The incubator is a bit like an accelerator, and only VC is more like a co-founder, which brings the idea of this clothing-owned startup to life.
Such transactions may involve larger shares than in standard seed transactions, but it provides more guidance and support. Red blood cells refused to say how much hunting lab it controlled.
In the past three months, Hunting Lab perfected its products enough to attract customers and earned $3 million in seed investment from red blood cells. Smith said the startup has also reached a $1.79 million contract with the Space Development Agency.
Interestingly, the Space Agency transactions are not from the Red Cell network. It comes from the Department of Defense contact between Smith and former Department of Defense project security engineer Tim Barone, who worked with Smith and is the co-founder of Hunter Labs, and Smith’s wife, Amanda Aguayoco. (“I have a cooldown period, which is two years for the Department of Defense.” Barnes said why he wasn’t directly involved in the sales.)
But many people in large departments know the founder, so they are different from many Silicon Valley-born defense technology startupIn any case, they don’t need such a warm introduction.
“They are recognized professionals themselves, so they can actually open the door,” Barnes said.
Hunting Labs also provides more traditional OSS software threat management, such as identifying software in use and discovering vulnerabilities in code. In this space, it has a lot of competition, such as Black Duck Software, Mend.io and Snyk.
