2024 Startups to Watch: Invary secures core protections against the bad guys of the dark web

Editor’s note: Startland News editors selected 10 Kansas City scaling businesses to spotlight for its annual Startups to Watch list. Now in its ninth year, this feature recognizes founders and startups that editors believe will make some of the biggest, most compelling news in the coming 12 months. The following is one of 2024’s companies.

Click here to view the full list of Startups to Watch — presented with support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and independently produced by Startland News.

[divide]

Invary is rewriting how cybersecurity is coded into the tech community’s perceptions, CEO Jason Rogers shared.

“Instead of saying, ‘Hey, what’s bad out there?’” he explained. “We’re just constantly saying, ‘Is this still good?’”

[pullquote]

Elevator pitch: Invary is Zero Trust for operating systems, removing dangerous assumptions about their runtime integrity and detecting previously hidden malware.

• Founders: Dr. Perry Alexander, Jason Rogers, Dr. Wesley Peck
• Headquarters: Lawrence, Kansas 
• Founding year: 2022
• Current employee count: 6 
• Funding to date: $2.5 million 
• Noteworthy investors: Flyover Capital, GROWKS, Royal Street Ventures, Kansas University Center for Research, Brian McClendon, Brad Garlinghouse
• Noteworthy programs: KU Innovation Park business incubator

[/pullquote]

“We detect sophisticated threats other systems can’t,” he continued. “We work on the operating system level.”

The Lawrence-based cybersecurity pioneer licenses technology from the NSA (National Security Agency), which Invary founder Dr. Perry Alexander —  a distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Kansas and an authority in Trusted Computing research — was familiar with through his research work in the space.

“I view it as a strong triangle,” said Dr. Wesley Peck, Invary CTO and Alexander’s protege and former student, who obtained his PhD under Alexander’s guidance. “We have government research, public university research, and a private company all working together to get this new technology out there.”

“Jason made a really good point at a conference that, ‘Hey, the bad guys work together,’” he continued. “They have these dark web places where they all go and they work together to attack us. We need to be a lot better about working together if we are going to counter that threat.”

After a strong angel investor round — led by Brian McClendon, Lawrence native and builder of Google Maps; Scott Coons, founder of Perceptive Software; and the University of Kansas Center for Research — Invary saw a large amount of momentum in 2023, said Rogers.

In March, the startup launched its free Runtime Integrity Score (RISe) service, allowing customers to spot-check their system’s integrity and identify hidden malware. Then in June, it announced a $1.85 million pre-seed round, led by Kansas City’s Flyover Capital, with additional participation from NetWork Kansas GROWKS Equity program and the KU Innovation Park.

“We’ve got great support from Flyover Capital, who is focused in the Midwest region, and a lot of support from the University of Kansas, as well,” said Rogers, who has extensive experience building secure cloud-scale platforms, and scaling engineering and operations at category leader Matterport through IPO. “We all have a goal of building up a large, impactful technology organization here in the Midwest, here in Lawrence, here in Kansas City. So we’re super excited to do that.”

RELATED: Lawrence cybersecurity startup raises $1.85M pre-seed round led by KC’s Flyover Capital

Invary team

Shortly after the pre-seed round, Rogers noted, Invary launched its Runtime Integrity Service.

“We have customers both in the government space and in the commercial space, so we’re probably a rare startup that’s working directly with both sides,” he added.

Rogers and Peck expect 2024 to be a year of big moves for Invary, they shared. They are already having conversations with several large CDN and SD-WAN providers.

“We expect quite a bit of growth in terms of our revenue,” Rogers explained. “We’ll have some major customer announcements — hopefully — here at the beginning of the year to kind of help springboard us through the rest of the year.”

Although they’ve been focused on Linux operating systems, Rogers and Peck also plan to release a Microsoft product in 2024.

“That’ll help protect those folks who have mostly a Windows environment,” Rogers added.

In the new year, the Invary team also aims to take the same concepts and extend them up the stack, Peck shared.

“The operating system really has an enormous amount of control over your security,” he explained. “If that thing is compromised, you can’t really trust anything running above it now. So once we can secure that lowest level thing, now we build up the stack and say, ‘OK, I know my operating system is behaving like it should be. Now let’s go protect applications.’”

The goal is eventually to work up to the network level, he continued.

“That’s not all going to happen in 2024,” he said, “but I think that’s the vision: to just keep trying to push this up the stack, building this tower of integrity, from the lowest level to the highest level. So I know everything’s working the way it’s supposed to be working.”

“That’s the utopia and where it leads,” Rogers added.

[divide]

Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2024

[slide-anything id=”696451″]

[divide]

Startups to Watch is possible thanks to support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a private, nonpartisan foundation that works together with communities in education and entrepreneurship to create uncommon solutions and empower people to shape their futures and be successful.

For more information, visit www.kauffman.org and connect at www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn