Jordan
Wallach

Picture the spreadsheet. A security firm in Queens is paying one officer three different hourly rates in a single week - day rate at a warehouse, night rate at a port, holiday-and-a-half on Sunday at a hospital lobby. Someone in a small back office is doing that math by hand, for hundreds of officers, while the phone rings and a client wants a guard moved by 6pm. That spreadsheet is the problem Jordan Wallach decided to spend his career on.

Wallach is the co-founder and CEO of Belfry, a New York company building what it calls the operating system for physical security firms. Scheduling, timekeeping, field operations, payroll and billing - the unglamorous machinery that keeps a guard company solvent - pulled into one platform. In January 2025 the company closed a $12 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, with existing backers Bienville Capital and Aglae Ventures staying in, pushing total funding past $20 million.

It is not the startup you would have predicted from his resume. He studied Mathematical and Computational Science at Stanford. He led the Bing Sports engineering team at Microsoft and shaped education tools inside Intune, software touched by millions. Then he spent two years at McKinsey as an engagement manager, advising software companies on growth and how to organize themselves. The obvious next move was another consumer app, another developer tool, another crowded category with a familiar pitch deck.

He went the other way.

The numbers are bigger than they sound. There are roughly one million security officers working in the United States, employed by about 8,000 businesses, in a market worth somewhere near $50 billion. These are the people at the warehouse gate, the patrol car circling an industrial park at 3am, the lobby desk that signs you in. The industry is enormous and almost entirely run on tools that were never built for it - generic scheduling apps, manual timesheets, payroll software that has no idea what a geofenced checkpoint tour is.

Belfry's co-founders, Wallach and CTO Alex Tulenko, did not arrive with a theory. They went to the source - sitting with security company owners across the country, watching the work, cataloguing the headaches. What came back was a list of operational pain points that compounded on each other: a schedule that did not talk to timekeeping, timekeeping that did not talk to payroll, payroll that did not talk to billing. Every disconnect was a place where money leaked and hours vanished.

Most software companies run from payroll. It is intricate, it is regulated, it is the kind of feature where a rounding error becomes a labor complaint. Belfry ran toward it. Officer pay in this industry is a thicket: wages change by site location, by time of day, by overtime threshold, by holiday, by the specific terms of a client contract. Getting that right, automatically, across thousands of shifts, is the difference between a tool a guard company tries and a tool it cannot operate without.

That is the bet. Not the flashy part of the stack, but the part nobody else wanted to build. It is also a clean illustration of how Wallach thinks about product. When asked what advice he would give other founders, his answer was almost stubbornly plain.

There is a phrase that follows Belfry around: the shift from reactive to proactive. A guard company without good software lives in a permanent present tense - reacting to a missed shift, a payroll dispute, an incident already written up. Wallach's argument is that the same data, consolidated and put to work, lets an owner see around corners. Performance tracking, labor-compliance alerts, profitability dashboards. The boring infrastructure of running ahead of the problem instead of behind it.

It is worth noticing the language Belfry chooses for all this. The company describes its mission as being "the best partner for our society's most critical workers." That is an unusual sentence to find attached to a back-office payroll platform. It signals something about how Wallach frames the work: not as digitizing a cost center, but as building for people the rest of technology forgot to serve.

The engineering bench backs the ambition. Belfry has assembled builders from Amazon, Microsoft and Google and pointed them at an industry most of Silicon Valley would not look at twice. That is the contrarian core of the company - top-tier technical talent aimed deliberately at the unglamorous middle of the economy.

The Series A is fuel, not a finish line. Belfry has said the round will grow the team by roughly half, hiring across product and engineering, customer experience, sales and marketing, and operations. The goal is straightforward: build faster, cover more of the operational surface area, and reach more of those 8,000 companies before anyone else does.

Wallach's own framing is unhurried. The platform exists to "empower security companies to operate efficiently, drive profitability, and focus on what matters most," and the plan from here is to keep "addressing more operational pain points for the security guard services industry." No grand reinvention of the category. Just one more headache removed, then the next.

It is a strange and specific bet - that the most defensible business is the one built on a problem too tedious for anyone else to want. The spreadsheet in Queens is still there. Jordan Wallach is betting his company on making it disappear.