A former Softcat executive has opened up on his first 18 months at Arco Cyber as he confirmed it is embracing a channel model.
Matt Helling launched the start-up cyber vendor in October 2022, alongside fellow Softcat alumni Adam Louca and Datamango CEO Graham Sawell.
The Arco platform aims to unify data from multiple cybersecurity tools and controls and provide insights for CISOs, IT teams and CFOs.
Pipe-smoking moment
The spark for Arco came when a Softcat vendor contact who had set up his own business gave Helling cause for reflection.
“He said ‘look at it this way: when you get to 60 or 70 years old and are retired, are you going to be happy that you gave it a go, or not?’. He called it the pipe-smoking moment’.
“So that was kind of the moment.
“Graham always called me ‘intrepreneurial’. I was always off doing things in Softcat and trying to get on the front foot in how the business needed to develop.
“I loved Softcat and had given it everything I could for pretty much two decades of my life. I owe so much to it. But I needed to evolve.
“I wanted to go out and learn, and get my teeth into what the entrepreneurial life really felt like.”
“Big learning curve”
Helling billed the Arco platform as a “control tower for CISOs”, adding that the challenge it aims to solve is similar to the one he faced at Softcat.
“When I was running the networking and security team at Softcat, my function was to guide customers on buying certain technology, platforms and services,” he said.
“If I think about the power of Arco, it’s the ability to signpost what customers need to do, and in which order, which really does hold a lot of value for the channel partners we’re working with.”
Building a start-up vendor from scratch has been “probably even more brutal than I expected”, Helling said, however.
“It’s been a big learning curve for us around how we position and build our messaging to fit the customer value piece, as opposed to that channel world of being the master of everything,” he said.
Partners can serve as resellers for Arco or white label it as part of their own consultancy service, Helling said.
“Some people were saying ‘you should go direct first’, and others were saying ‘no, you should build a channel’,” Helling added.
“We’ve settled back to that viewpoint that the value we’re bringing to customers needs to be delivered through the channel.”
“If I was doing it again, I would have raised capital sooner”
With one foot in the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market and another in the continuous controls monitoring (CCM) space, Arco Cyber competes with the likes of San Diego-based Drata.
Drata has raised $328m in funding to date, according to Crunchbase.
In contrast, Arco was “bootstrapped” by its founders, something Helling said he would probably opt against doing if he had his time again.
“We did a very, very early pre-seed round to put some cash in the business and allow us to recruit sales and marketing,” he explained.
“But the reality is we’re still sat here 18 months down the line and I haven’t drawn a salary. We’re generating revenue. We pay the people in the company. But it puts a lot of risk on us as individuals and founders to run this business.
“We’re likely going to go out and raise capital. I think if I was doing it again, with the knowledge I have now, I would have gone through this process sooner, rather than taking the pressure on my own shoulders,” he said.
Arco has lost a number of deals “because the maturity of our platform wasn’t quite there yet”, Helling also acknowledged.
“The good thing around the opportunities we lost is the customers were saying ‘you’re almost there; when you’ve done x, y and z, come back to us and we’ll be interested’,” he added, however.
Raising capital would “allow us to operate at a faster pace than we are operating at the moment”, Helling stressed.
Helling concluded: “Looking back on the last 18 months, it’s been exciting, but it can get overwhelming. It feels like we’re really finding our feet, and the feedback we’re getting from customers and prospects is landing well.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
