Louisville’s Swimlane making a splash in cybersecurity pool

LOUISVILLE — Swimlane LLC, a Louisville cybersecurity startup, has been doing its best Michael Phelps impersonation over the past several years by outpacing competitors, boosting sales, expanding internationally and adding key new executives.

The company, founded in 2014 by Cody Cornell, recently completed a $23 million Series B funding round that will springboard the company into the future.

Swimlane specializes in security orchestration, automation and response software. That platform — often referred to as SOAR — helps companies and organizations manage cyber threats without having to employ large teams of security analysts.

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Cornell, who spent a decade as an analyst before diving into the startup pool, said clients in need of security services were often “struggling with the lack of available talent and struggling with turnover because there was a talent war going on and people were being picked off” by competitors.

Security-threat alerts are traditionally routed to human employees for review and response.

“But when there are more alerts than there are people, you start to run into a situation where the alerts don’t get responded to,” he said. “We’ve built an automation platform that takes in those notifications and tasks and automatically does all the things that we wish those security analysts would have time to do.”

Swimlane’s clients run the gamut from credit-card companies to government agencies to pharmaceutical firms.

Those customers are spread across the globe. Currently, clients in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are served by Swimlane staff based in the United Kingdom. The company plans to increase its overseas presence in the coming years.

“We’ve got a bit of a footprint globally, and we are really going to ramp that up,” Swimlanes’ recently hired chief operating officer, Jim Hansen said. “You’re going to see the Swimlane brand everywhere.”

The company’s Series B fundraising effort, led by Energy Impact Partners, a venture-capital firm with offices in New York and San Francisco, will help facilitate that growth.

Of Swimlane’s roughly 75 employees, about 10 percent work internationally.

As the company builds its overseas customer base, “we will have more and more staff internationally in support, sales and professional services roles,” Cornell said.

“The team [both overseas and in the United States] has doubled in size over that couple of years, which is great for us and for the state of Colorado,” he said. “We’re adding more jobs to the area.”

Cornell said he expects Swimlane’s employee headcount to increase “pretty dramatically” in the coming months. “We’re looking at upwards of a 50 percent uplift in staff over the next 12 months.”

In addition to Hansen, Swimlane has bolstered its executive team with the recent hire of senior vice president of global sales Tom Smith and vice president of global marketing Susan Warner.

While Cornell said Swimlane “is always looking for opportunities” to bring on new investors, the company’s main focus will be “smartly deploying our existing capital over the next couple of years. Fundraising, thankfully, moves to the backburner, and we get to focus on execution and customer success.”

New capital will allow the company “to continue to innovate the platform — there’s always work that can be done to make the product more capable and solve news sets of problems.”

Despite the company’s success, Cornell said Swimlane has not outgrown its Colorado roots.

“Colorado’s been really good to us from a fundraising perspective and from a talent perspective,” Cornell said. From support from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade to overseas trade missions with former Gov. John Hickenlooper to access to the Rocky Mountain Venture Club, “there are a lot of things going on here that have been beneficial for us.”