A former military and NSA cybersecurity expert and a federal government contracting guru are leading a cybersecurity testing company. You probably haven't heard of vThreat yet. That's changing. The company has plans to raise outside capital and more than quadruple its team this year.

Founder: Marcus Carey (above)
CEO: Eric Whittleton
How they met: Through Virginia’s MACH37 cybersecurity incubator program. Eric was a mentor.
HQ: Fairfax and Austin
Product: Apps that allow organizations to run adversary simulations so they know if their cybersecurity solutions are running properly and catching the latest threats. The company also has security control testing apps in an online vThreat app store that companies use to calibrate their security technology. 
When did vThreat launch and why? September 2014. Marcus had built adversary simulations for the federal government and realized private sector companies struggled to definitively say whether their cybersecurity products were catching all threats, all the time. Companies may not realize that a cybersecurity solution doesn’t work in their network or they don’t know that cybersecurity products can mysteriously stop working. 
Customers: Any company with a network of 400 to over 70,000 users. The product was released in December and vThreat has closed two big deals. There have been in-bound leads through vThreat’s website from over 700 global companies.
Approach to market: Direct sales to the private and public sector, but also launching a channel partner program.

Photo: Eric Whittleton, CEO
Outside funding: Some seed funding and currently raising a Series A round.
Employees: Four, but could be at 20 by the end of 2016. 
Marcus’ background: Growing up in a small, rural town, Marcus enlisted in the Navy at 18 and was trained in cryptography. He was stationed at Ft. Meade and traveled the world doing network security work for NSA. After finishing his military career, Marcus worked for CSC, training top DOD law enforcement in catching hackers through simulations he created in the cloud. The entrepreneurial bug eventually bit.
Eric’s background: Spent most of his career in federal contracting, including joining Information Systems Support in 1996. The company was at eight employees and $1M in revenue and then grew to 1,100 and over $200M a decade later. As COO, Eric oversaw its sale to CACI. He spent three years at CACI as an EVP. He joined vThreat last year as CEO. 
2016 outlook: Rolling out vThreat Breach Me, a compliance app that measures certain organizational risks.

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