WitFoo was founded by veterans of the US Military, law enforcement and cybersecurity in February 2016 to research, enhance and equip the craft of cybersecurity operations. Over the last two years, we have raised more than $1M in capital from almost 100 individual investors that share a desire to see the world made safer.
We have not followed a traditional path in our efforts to raise capital. Rather, we’ve relied on grass-roots, word-of-mouth to get customers and investors alike excited about WitFoo. When we started the company, the founders agreed that we didn’t want to follow a traditional “software startup” path of raising money through venture capitalists and then staffing up sales & marketing to deliver the perception of being bigger and better than the truth would reveal.
We have had opportunities to accept institutional investments, but the terms were not favorable or in-line with our philosophies. Instead, we decided to focus our efforts on building a sound business and closing revenue which has the power to solve all problems. Revenue puts money in the bank, it pays for our operating costs, allows for expansion and delivers a more compelling story to investors if we ever want to pursue that path.
Our logic to this approach is quite simple; we don’t want to dilute ownership or give up any control of our company. We also don’t want to work for someone else. Running your own company, after all, is supposed to be fun. We like the idea of working for ourselves, the challenge of building a successful company, and the gratification every single day has the potential of bringing. If we had accepted institutional money from the on-set, we would ultimately be working for someone else right now.
We were blessed to have an angel investor share our vision early on. Along with that initial investment and financial contributions from the founders, friends and family we were able to build a GA product without the need of venture capital.
We have achieved great things in a very short time, including securing our first customers, signing multiple national resell partners as well as a global distribution agreement with Westcon/Comstor. We have built a world-class web site and channel program that allows us to achieve massive scale while keeping our costs low. We have earned a tremendous following on social media including thousands of followers on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. We are adding new deployments every month as our pipeline continues to grow.
Our customer centric Go-To-Market strategy provides end-users everything they need to sell the value of WitFoo up the corporate chain of command. Our pricing is simple, cost-contained and aligns with standard metrics every CFO can approve. Through our online community, free trials of WitFoo Precinct are offered as well as online pricing calculators. Prospective customers can generate their own quotes, download, deploy and evaluate our product in less than an hour and produce metrics that will justify the purchase of WitFoo. Utilizing our growing channel program and Go-to-market strategy, we expect to grow the company from a $5M valuation in 2017 to a $250M valuation exiting 2020. By the end of 2018, we expect to increase our customer base to 10 with $2.5M in bookings and $1M in recurring annual revenue. These projections coupled with our increased exposure are beginning to catch the attention of competitors and collaborators alike.
To test the interest level of the greater investor community, we recently completed a successful capital raise leveraging SEC Title 3 regulation crowdfunding via StartEngine (www.startengine.com). We not only reached our goal but far exceeded our maximum raise of $107,000.00 with a feeding frenzy for shares during the final week of our campaign. This is an encouraging sign for WitFoo as it clearly demonstrates there are a lot of people that share our vision and believe enough in what we’re doing to invest their hard-earned money.
We are committed to delivering a maximum return to each of our investors. This commitment along with our mission to improve the craft of information security is what keeps us going every day. We are forever grateful to everyone who has contributed to our mission and very bullish on what the future has in store for WitFoo and our investors.
