Picnic
💼 Cybersecurity | 🗓️ Founded in 2015 | 💲 Series A | 💵 $14,000,000
👥 11-50 Employees | 📍 Fully Remote
About Picnic
A gritty, pioneering team of intelligence and cybersecurity specialists focused on solving the security challenge of our time: social engineering.
The world digitized faster than society imagined.
For decades, the promise of big data was on the horizon as a means to make sense out of our digital chaos.
The big data wave crested and crashed: there is more data at the fingertips of any human than anytime in history – all you need is a smartphone and the internet. While there are many positives associated with such rapid innovation, a dangerous current cuts through our online world: hackers also use big data tools to make cents from the digital chaos.
Until now, the cybersecurity industry has done what it knows how to do best: harden infrastructure.
By locking hackers out of systems, traditional cybersecurity vendors tried to stem the tide of attacks. We are at an inflection point: further hardening of infrastructure is a losing battle, because hackers know that they only need to trick a human to defeat the most powerful technical solutions.
The human operating system is fallible.
Love, fear, curiosity, and other emotions present potential ways that we can be manipulated, and personal information about each of us tells hackers what our passions and concerns are. This fundamental situation is the reason the social engineering problem is so challenging to resolve, and has remained such a threat.
Recognizing that our own data trails are being used against us, and that humans are vulnerable to exploitation, Picnic’s founders realized that the solution to the social engineering problem – the way to protect people from those who would use their information against them – is to think like a hacker, to focus on harnessing the power of information for good, and to provide people with the technological means to reduce their visibility and accessibility to social engineers by controlling their data footprint.
The team at Picnic was built to achieve this.
Technical Leadership Team
What They're Building
Previously, security teams have not had a capability to address OSINT data vulnerabilities, leaving them to worry about the human element.
The Picnic platform solves that problem.
They’ve created a privacy-forward, groundbreaking technology platform that protects people from social engineering attacks. By controlling data footprints beyond the firewall, Picnic makes each employee safer, both at work and at home, and creates an enterprise-wide ‘human firewall’ for next-generation protection.
Company Culture
Who leads the engineering team? Mike Hans, VP of Engineering, has established his career in the cybersecurity space. His background includes several cybersecurity startups where he has mentored and scaled the engineering teams. In this interview, Mike reveals why Picnic operated in stealth mode while building their product and customer base
