We are very excited to announce our investment in Kobalt, a new security as a service company.

Security is increasingly on everybody’s mind, with several high profile, large scale hacks over the past few years. Here at Version One, we had our own unfortunate incident (and learning experience) only a few weeks ago. Yet while security is a real concern for all, the reality is that many small and medium sized organizations don’t have the resources to have a full-time security expert on staff to monitor security incidents.

This is where Kobalt comes in: Kobalt levels up your security efforts by continuously monitoring for security incidents so that companies can respond quickly and effectively to incidents before they become security nightmares.

There are two important aspects about this investment for our firm.

One, this is our first security investment. We have been looking at this space for a while, but never found the right entry point. I am excited that we finally are active in the security vertical and hope to invest in more security start-ups down the road.

Second, Kobalt is the first company we have helped incubate. Incubation requires much more hands-on involvement than simply investing in a company. I don’t anticipate that we’ll do many incubations. But, this was a unique chance to work with one of Vancouver’s best entrepreneurs. Pankaj Agarwal has built several very successful services businesses in the tech space, including Optimus Information and Trinimbus.

And, last but not least, we got incredibly lucky to find a superbly talented team to start this company: Michael Argast and Jeff La Porte. Michael has spent almost all of his career in the security space, working for Sophos and Telus, among others. Jeff La Porte is one of the best start-up CTO’s I had the privilege to work with in the past.

Kobalt launched their service only a few weeks ago and initial market reaction has been very positive, especially from enterprise SaaS companies that are getting increased scrutiny from their clients about their security standards.

If you run a SaaS company (or any other company that needs to level up its security in a cost-efficient way), please email Michael at michael [at] kobalt [dot] io or sign up for a 1:1 meeting here and we can get you more information about Kobalt and how we might be able to help you. As the Kobalt team says, every leader deserves a good night’s sleep and every organization deserves great security.