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The Two Engineers Who Turned Locked Doors Into a Software Problem
Justin Dagen and Jason Higley spent 15 years wiring up access control for Fortune 100 campuses. Then they built the off-the-shelf product they wished existed - and sold it to the company chasing the same doors.
CYRISMA
CYRISMA is a Rochester, New York-based cybersecurity company that builds a unified, cloud-hosted cyber risk management platform for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), MSSPs, and internal IT teams. It consolidates vulnerability and patch management, sensitive data discovery, secure configuration scanning, attack surface visibility, dark web monitoring, compliance tracking, and risk monetization into a single multi-tenant dashboard - replacing a stack of point tools with one affordable, per-endpoint-priced product. Founded in 2018, the company raised a $7M Series A in 2024 and serves thousands of organizations through partners.
Paychex
Paychex is a Rochester, New York-based provider of payroll, human resources, retirement and insurance services for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 1971 by Tom Golisano with $3,000, it has grown into a Fortune 500 company that pays roughly 1 in 11 U.S. private-sector workers and now embeds AI across its platforms following its 2025 acquisition of Paycor.
Mark Balovnev
Mark Balovnev is the CEO of CYRISMA, a Rochester, New York cybersecurity risk-management platform built for MSPs and MSSPs. A serial founder who wrote his first line of code at nine and dropped out of business school at eighteen, he scaled the digital-credentialing company EduChain to more than 1.5 million users and a private-equity exit, co-founded the non-human identity security firm Vantyr, and took the top job at CYRISMA in January 2025 just after the company closed a $7 million growth round. He describes his work as operating in the gap between technical complexity and business urgency.
Olivia Lew
Olivia Lew runs Casana, a Rochester, New York company that turned a toilet seat into an FDA-cleared cardiovascular monitor. A former General Catalyst principal and Capgemini consultant with an MBA from Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, she was an early investor in Casana before joining as an operator. She sits on the Boston American Heart Association board and has spent the last few years arguing, in podcasts and press, that the most reliable way to check on someone's heart is to stop asking them to do anything at all.