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Originally written for Jacksonville Business Journal by James Cannon

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. –The First Coast is chock full of companies and nonprofits developing new products, growing their teams and supporting their communities.

To provide a window into that growth, we’ve singled out six outstanding innovators to honor with the 2023 Fire Awards, presented by First Coast Inno and the Jacksonville Business Journal. The honorees include startups and more established firms, and vary in industry and geography across the First Coast.

Company Name: OnDefend

Industry: Cyber Security

CEO: Chris Freedman

Year Founded: 2016

Brief description of what the company does: Private label security-as-a-service and cyber security, threat, detection and assessment firm.

2022 Funding: N/A

As you reflect on 2022’s successes and growth, what was the prime contributing factor?

A strong 2022 strategic plan resulted in another fantastic year of growth despite a waning economy and recession fears toward the end of the year. Because we have a multitude of revenue streams ranging from our cutting-edge products to our wide array of security services, we were not wholly dependent on one offering. Additionally, the fact that we service partners and direct customers further diversified our market share dependence. Regarding our comprehensive security service offerings, our primary customers are other national and international cyber security firms who subcontract us, under their brand, to service their customers. Security talent had become extremely hard to find, employ and retain for years now, which increased wage demands and decreased our partner’s service profit margins. These companies private label us to remove their profit margin fluctuation and to meet market demand without delay. With 2022’s economic uncertainty, our strategic partners began to remove their fixed-expense employee costs and outsource even more services. This also motivated new strategic partners to seek us out and capitalize on the strategic advantage we can afford them.

Now that VC funding and investments have begun to slow, what is your strategy for seeking outside capital?

We have had the rare strategic advantage of not requiring outside capital to find service & product market fit as well as to grow to meet their corresponding demands. This has specifically allowed us to make fast and nimble product moves to find product/market fit with our proprietary SaaS solutions, including our BlindSPOT Breach & Attack Simulation Solution. Now that we are achieving product market fit with our SaaS solutions, we may seek outside debt or equity partners to scale and meet partner and customer demand throughout the US and around the World.

Taking a step back to the company’s founding, are you where you expected to be by now? If more or less, how so?

When we first started we expected to be serving companies in Jacksonville and possibly the Southeast. We never imagined that we would be securing private and public organizations throughout the world. We started out as a pure-play consulting firm with the hope of launching a software division and creating completely unique solutions, but there are very few service providers

that have successfully spun up software divisions, much less found product/market fit for their software solutions. We seem to have successfully navigated those murky waters thus far.

Where does the company go from here? What is next for your company in the short to near-term?

We believe that our company will begin to scale more rapidly and have a larger brand presence in our industry. Our BlindSPOT solution is enabling our direct customers and partners, as well also our internal services team to provide offerings that competitors in our industry cannot. With this distinctive advantage comes the opportunity for scale and we only see more of that in our short- and long-term future.

What is your outlook for your industry and the role you play in it going into the new year?

As cyber grows, so does our industry, and cybercrime is growing at an unprecedented rate. The global cyber security market was valued at $202.72 billion in 2022 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 12.3% from 2023 to 2030. Our services and products division can address much of that total addressable market and that is our north star. We also have some paradigm shifting patents that we have yet to develop into commercial SaaS solutions. These patents are focused on identifying account comprises and employee impersonation attacks not only for the email domain, but across many domains including social, media and even new technologies like the metaverse. We plan for our groundbreaking technologies to solve the problems that have not been solved and level the playing field for organizations and individuals against the emerging threats that target them.

Read the original article here: https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/inno/stories/awards/2023/01/19/2023inno-on-fire-ondefend.html

OnDefend Media Contact: Lauren Verno, Lauren.verno@ondefend.com