Huntress

Right now, somewhere, a hacker is losing.

At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, a dental office in Ohio has no idea anything is wrong. The receptionist's laptop is asleep. The owner is asleep. But a foothold dropped by a ransomware crew is quietly trying to spread - and it just tripped a sensor that no one in that office will ever see. Eight minutes later, the threat is contained. A human analyst, not a chatbot, made the call. The dental office finds out in the morning, by email, that it was almost a very bad week.

That office is one of roughly 150,000 businesses now sitting behind Huntress. The company sells something deceptively simple: enterprise-grade cybersecurity for organizations that were told, for years, that they were too small to bother protecting and too small to bother attacking. Both claims turned out to be wrong.

The 99% nobody was selling to.

The cybersecurity industry has always had a type. It builds for the Fortune 500 - the banks, the governments, the companies with a Chief Information Security Officer and a budget to match. The tools are powerful, expensive, and require a team of specialists to babysit. For a 40-person law firm or a regional accounting practice, that's not a product. That's a foreign language with a six-figure price tag.

So the small and mid-sized businesses did the rational thing: they bought antivirus, crossed their fingers, and hoped to be too boring to target. Their IT providers - the managed service providers, or MSPs - were left holding the risk with tools that were either too complicated or full of gaps. Meanwhile attackers noticed something the vendors hadn't. The little guys were soft, plentiful, and increasingly profitable to hit at scale.

This is the tension the whole company hangs on. Attackers had already democratized cybercrime. Defense was still a luxury good. Huntress exists to close that gap, and every product decision since has been a variation on the same stubborn question: how do you give a 30-person company the security of a 30,000-person one - without the 30,000-person staff?

Three NSA operators walk into a basement.

In 2015, Kyle Hanslovan, Chris Bisnett, and John Ferrell were doing what former National Security Agency cyber operators tend to do: high-end offensive and defensive work as government contractors. Their firm, StrategicIO, built tooling to hunt the quiet footholds attackers leave behind - the persistence mechanisms that survive a reboot and wait. It worked. It also revealed the obvious limit of a services business: you can only hunt as many networks as you have humans.

The bet was to turn the hunting into a product, and aim it at the market the giants had skipped. The seed capital was unglamorous and perfect: $100,000 won at the Capture the Flag contest at DEF CON, the hacking community's annual proving ground. It is a deeply on-brand way to fund a company whose stated purpose is to wreck hackers - take the prize money from out-hacking everyone, then spend it making hackers' lives worse.

The early years were not a rocket ship. They were a grind of selling to skeptical MSPs one at a time. The company reportedly scaled from zero to eight figures of revenue without spending on a single ad - an approach that is either admirably disciplined or quietly stubborn, depending on how you feel about marketing budgets. The growth came from a community that trusted the founders because the founders spoke their language.

Software plus humans, not software instead of them.

The Huntress idea is a hybrid. Lightweight agents sit on endpoints and watch. When something looks wrong, the signal doesn't go to a dashboard that a busy IT person may check on Thursday. It goes to a Security Operations Center staffed around the clock by analysts - now AI-assisted - whose job is to investigate, decide, and remediate. The customer buys an outcome, not homework.

What started as one product is now four, and the company kept its pricing refreshingly blunt: pick what you need, pay per unit, no feature-gating you into a higher tier to unlock the thing you actually wanted.

The receipts.

Mission statements are cheap. The interesting part is whether the market agreed. It did, repeatedly, with money. Five funding rounds carried Huntress from a $50,000 accelerator check to a $150M Series D in June 2024 led by Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital, doubling the valuation past $1.5 billion and minting a cybersecurity unicorn. Revenue followed the same curve, crossing $100M in annual recurring revenue with reported growth around 70% in back-to-back years.

The hardware of credibility came too. Huntress Managed EDR took CRN's 2025 Product of the Year in endpoint protection, and the company topped CRN's ITDR Annual Report Card the same year. It landed on Inc.'s Best Workplaces list two years running - useful for a company whose product is, ultimately, the judgment of the people in its SOC. And in 2025 Microsoft signed on to a collaboration that layers Huntress onto Defender and Microsoft 365, a quiet vote of confidence from the platform most of its customers already live inside.

Securing the 99%.

Investors have a phrase for what Huntress does: securing the 99%. It is a tidy way of describing a market that was hiding in plain sight - the millions of organizations beneath the enterprise tier that, added together, run a startling share of the actual economy. The corner pharmacy, the manufacturer, the school district, the clinic. They don't make headlines when they're breached, which is precisely why they were left exposed.

The mission has a useful side effect: it keeps the company honest about scope. When most of your customers don't have a security team, you can't ship complexity and call it a feature. Every product has to be something a generalist IT person, or the MSP serving twelve clients at once, can switch on and trust. That constraint is the moat. It's hard to retrofit simplicity into tools designed for specialists, and easy to forget the customer when you've never had to sell to them.

The attackers got tools, too.

Here's the uncomfortable part. The same AI that helps the Huntress SOC triage faster also hands the other side cheaper, faster, more convincing attacks. Phishing that reads like a real colleague. Identity attacks that slip past passwords entirely. The gap between what attackers can do and what small businesses can defend against is not closing on its own - and the targets are not getting bigger or better-staffed.

So the next decade of Huntress looks less like one clever product and more like an expanding perimeter: endpoints, then identities, then logs, then training, then whatever the attackers move to next. The bet is that the underserved 99% will keep needing a defender that speaks their language and charges their budget. On current evidence, that bet keeps paying.

Which brings us back to that dental office in Ohio. A decade ago, the foothold would have spread, the files would have locked, and the owner would have learned a new word - ransomware - from a note on the screen demanding payment. Today it tripped a sensor, a human caught it, and the worst thing that happened was an email. Huntress didn't make the office bigger. It just made being small a lot less dangerous.