Monad: Cybersecurity Infrastructure is the Next Frontier
By Shaun Maguire on behalf of Team Sequoia
Today, we are incredibly excited to announce our partnership with Christian Almenar, Jacolon Walker, and the team at Monad. We believe that Infrastructure is the next white space in cybersecurity and that Monad will serve as the bedrock there.
We’ve known we wanted to work with the Monad team for years. We first met Christian during the seed round for his last company, Intrinsic, which went on to be acquired by VMware. Christian has an insatiable curiosity, which could even be described as magnetic.
On New Year’s Day 2019, Christian and I met up for breakfast at Gjelina in Venice, Los Angeles. We share a passion for space, so breakfast turned into lunch as we ended up discussing the rocket equation for a couple hours (napkin scribbles included). A week later he sent the following text messages and photo. He had grokked the conversation deeply enough that he was able (and inspired enough) to re-teach the equation to his nephew.
We haven’t known Jacolon for as long but he also captured our heart from our first Zoom, where he takes every meeting with a DEFCON pirate flag hanging on the wall behind him. Jacolon spent years as a pen-tester before becoming a security engineer at Palantir, then running security at Collective Health and Opendoor.
Who wouldn’t want to be in business with these guys?
We knew we wanted to partner with this team long before they had the right idea. So going back to ancient times, before COVID-19, we’d meet with them most Fridays to talk about company ideas (sometimes Jim Goetz or Bill Coughran would join, too). Christian and Jacolon presented 5+ ideas before they showed up with the “right idea”, and the “right idea” was one of the biggest security opportunities we’d heard in years.
The average F500 company manages 100+ cybersecurity vendors, most of which are consumed as dashboards. Getting data from these products to a data warehouse (such as Snowflake) is still an unruly pain-in-the-butt.
Enter Monad, where they’ve built data connectors to make it easy to get all your security data into one place. This enables all the obvious analysis and cross-correlations you could dream of to be added on top.
Since we led Monad’s seed round a year and a half ago, the team has been grinding away in stealth; shipping connectors, working with some *stellar* design partners, and assembling a world-class team (Amer Deeba joined as Chief Commercial Officer after spending 17 years as Qualys’ CMO and CCO).
This is a joint seed and A announcement. Sequoia led the seed and our friend Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas over at Index led the A. Monad is growing its team rapidly. If you’re interested in joining them check out their jobs page here.
