In the summer of 2021, Brooke Motta went to Flagstaff to visit Jimmy Mesta. She knew him first as a customer, the sort of connection that is supposed to live neatly in a sales pipeline. Instead, they went hiking. Somewhere along the trail, the conversation turned to Kubernetes - the machinery companies were using to make software more portable, scalable, and difficult to see in one piece. Mesta understood the technical problem from inside cloud security. Motta understood what enterprise buyers were struggling to explain. By the time the hike was over, a customer relationship had become the beginning of a founding team.
Motta later wrote that they took the leap with equal parts fear and excitement. That is an unusually honest ratio for a startup origin story. There was no garage mythology, no claim that the future had arrived fully diagrammed. There were two people who had spent years close to the problem and realized the tools were lagging behind the architecture.
A founder's education, hidden inside sales
Before Motta became a CEO, she spent roughly two decades learning how security companies grow. She worked in sales at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, then spent close to a decade at Rapid7. She moved through Bugcrowd, Wallarm, and Sonatype, holding senior sales and revenue roles while the security market changed around her. RAD's own biography says she helped scale companies from seed to IPO.
The titles tell only half the story. Enterprise security sales is an extended tutorial in doubt. Buyers ask where a tool fits, which alert matters, how it changes a workflow, who has to operate it, and whether it will survive the next architecture change. A seller hears the same objections until they become a map of the market. Motta's founder advantage was not that she could write Kubernetes internals. It was that she had learned where technical value gets lost between a product and the people expected to trust it.
Mesta brought the complementary view. He had worked as a security practitioner around containerized infrastructure. Their partnership joined the person who had repeatedly taken security products to market with the person who had repeatedly encountered the underlying systems. It was not a random founder-matching exercise. It was trust with a work history.
Start narrow enough to be understood
The company was called KSOC - Kubernetes Security Operations Center - and its first pitch was specific. As Kubernetes spread, teams needed a better way to discover clusters, repair misconfigurations, and control access without slowing developers down. In February 2022, KSOC announced a $6 million seed round led by .406 Ventures, with Vertex Ventures US and Gula Tech Adventures participating.
Specificity gave the young company a clean entry point. Kubernetes was not merely another item in the technology stack. It changed how software was packaged, deployed, and updated. That motion created security gaps that static inventories and known signatures could miss. The environment could change between scans. A clean configuration on Monday was not proof of safe behavior on Tuesday.
The product thesis gradually moved from configuration toward behavior. RAD creates a baseline of what a cloud workload, identity, or piece of infrastructure normally does. It then looks for drift. The idea is less theatrical than predicting every attack and more useful: understand the local pattern well enough to notice when something materially changes.
That loop also reveals Motta's operating instinct. Security teams rarely suffer from a shortage of notifications. They suffer from a shortage of confidence about which notification deserves action. A behavioral baseline is valuable only if it shrinks the distance between signal and decision. Her public interviews return repeatedly to visibility, practical response, and helping teams move without adding another pile of alerts.
The name had to outgrow Kubernetes
By March 2024, KSOC had become RAD Security. The old name described a category. The new one made room for a broader company. Motta framed the shift around behavioral cloud-native detection and response - infrastructure, identities, workloads, and the software supply chain viewed together rather than as separate dashboards.
That spring brought a test of Motta's ability to compress the idea. RAD was selected as one of ten finalists for the RSAC Innovation Sandbox. Each company had three minutes to pitch. Video from the event shows Motta onstage explaining a technical product to a room trained to resist hand-waving. Later that year, RAD was also one of four finalists in Black Hat USA's Startup Spotlight competition.
The double appearance mattered because Motta has been candid about presentation anxiety. In a later LinkedIn post encouraging other founders to apply, she wrote that she used to be terrified in those rooms. The stage did not become easier by pretending fear was absent. It became familiar through repetition. By 2025, Black Hat listed her as a Startup Spotlight judge. It did so again in 2026.
Capital as a claim on the next problem
In February 2025, RAD announced a $14 million Series A led by Cheyenne Ventures. Forgepoint Capital, Lytical Ventures, Akamai, and earlier backers also participated. Together with the seed round, the financing brought disclosed funding to $20 million. Motta said the money would expand the company's AI capabilities, threat modeling, and reach in global markets.
The timing was not accidental. Enterprises were adding AI systems to infrastructure already made complicated by cloud services and containers. The same organizations that had struggled to see every workload now had to understand models, autonomous processes, data access, and identities that were not human. RAD's earlier bet - observe behavior at runtime, establish context, and react to meaningful drift - had found a new workload.
Motta's career makes that transition easier to understand as a market decision. Good operators do not bolt the current trend onto a product and call it strategy. They ask whether the original insight still holds. Here, it did. An AI agent can read a file, call a tool, run a command, and contact an external service. Each action may appear ordinary in isolation. The chain can still create risk.
The agent is now inside the workflow
In 2026, RAD introduced AgentKeeper, a product focused on the activity of AI coding and productivity agents. Its job is to monitor agent actions across workstations, apply organizational policy, and retain an audit trail. The product follows prompts, tool calls, files, repositories, users, and sessions because a process tree alone cannot explain intent.
The company also worked on ClawKeeper for OpenClaw-related security. In March, Motta and Mesta spent more than an hour discussing the new attack surface on the Venture with Grace podcast. The setting had changed from a Flagstaff trail to a conversation about autonomous software, but their division of labor was recognizable: technical depth beside customer and market strategy.
Motta describes the objective in terms of enablement. Security should make it possible for teams to adopt technology with evidence and control. The distinction is important. A tool that only says no will be routed around. A tool that shows what happened, applies a policy at the moment of action, and keeps a usable record can become part of the workflow.
The quiet craft is listening
Motta's public leadership advice is practical. Set a vision. Align goals with it. Give capable people room to do their jobs. Allow fast failure, then keep moving. Her recommendations from former colleagues emphasize work ethic, perseverance, team instincts, and an eye for leverage. She volunteers as a coach with Girls on the Run and has spoken about mentorship and the need to build meaningful relationships for women raising venture capital.
Those ideas can sound like standard management language until placed beside the company's origin. RAD exists because Motta maintained a relationship with a customer, listened closely enough to recognize a shared problem, and trusted a technical counterpart enough to build with him. Her go-to-market career was not the prelude to the real work. It was the work that made the founding insight legible.
The systems keep changing. First it was containers. Then the wider cloud. Now it is agents with tools and autonomy. Motta's bet is that behavior remains the useful thread. Watch what the system actually does. Compare it with the context around it. Give a human enough evidence to act. On a trail in Flagstaff, that was a company idea. Five years later, it looks more like a way of paying attention.