Partnering with Anetac: Recruiting, Product & Capital

When we first met Tim Eades, the CEO and co-founder of Anetac, two things immediately stood out—his deep understanding of the challenges facing enterprise security teams and his intense commitment to building solutions that, above all else, focus on the customer. 

Tim—who has a long-time relationship with our Partner and Head of GTM, Danny Oliveri—is a seasoned veteran in cybersecurity. He was previously the CEO at vArmour, Silver Tail Systems, and Everyone.net, giving him over 20 years of experience driving growth for security and enterprise software companies. Prior to officially starting Anetac, Tim and his team spent months interviewing security executives at Fortune 500 companies around the globe to really understand their pain points. One theme came up over and over again: managing service accounts is a huge headache.

Service accounts are used for machine-to-machine authentication, are not often tied to human users, and often have highly privileged access to sensitive enterprise resources. The proliferation of these accounts has turned them into a prime target for attackers. Unsurprisingly, CISOs want to put service accounts on a tighter leash by enforcing "least privilege"—basically, making sure service accounts can only access what they absolutely need and nothing more. But that's easier said than done with existing identity management tools. Even more concerning, most CISOs have zero idea how many service accounts they have or what those accounts do. This lack of understanding means that changing privileges or updating the credentials of a service account risks breaking a product, or worse, bringing it to a halt. 

That's the problem Anetac is solving. The team is building a new platform that helps security teams discover, monitor and rightsize permissions for service accounts. The goal is to give enterprises the visibility and control they need to implement least privilege at scale.

TheGP + Anetac 

We’re grateful Tim chose TheGP as a partner from the jump, back when he still had a library of raw discovery notes to inform his thinking around solving the least privilege problem. In addition to leading Anetac’s seed round, we contributed sweat equity across talent and product over six months inside the company. 

On the talent side, TheGP’s Nazia Mastan and Josh Hernández recruited Baber Amin, Anetac's Head of Product, Sun Yu, their Head of Design, and four senior engineers. In doing this work, we also standardized hiring best practices at Anetac—from developing executive summaries to building out candidate pipelines to overseeing interviews and offers to establishing compensation bands. 

On the product side, TheGP’s Marcus Gosling spent several months embedded with the Anetac team to strategically shape the UX and UI for their MVP, which included figuring out how to visually represent activity across chains of service accounts. Within two weeks of working with Anetac, Marcus built a vision demo they could bring into sales meetings, which ultimately helped the team iterate quickly based on granular user feedback. From there, we backfilled Marcus by sourcing, interviewing and closing the Head of Design role. 

As Baber recently told us, "The thing that stuck out about TheGP [as recruiters] is that recruiters don’t usually have a good understanding of what they’re actually recruiting for. There’s often a mismatch between what they tell you and what happens when you speak to the company’s hiring team. Contrary to the norm, Nazia had a deep understanding of Anetac and exactly what my role would be. Also, finding a senior person like Marcus who could both ideate on initial product concepts and help us hire his replacement, this early on, is extremely hard. That’s a classic startup challenge that Anetac didn’t have to go through, and I don’t think it’s even possible to quantify how beneficial that type of support is.” 

As investors, we’re now excited to double down on Anetac’s $16M Series A. As Anetac has been in stealth over the past year, they've already landed several design partnerships with major companies, a testament to the strength of their product, but also the experience of their team. CISOs are rightfully cautious when onboarding new vendors, and founders who bring established trust and networks with customers have a particularly strong advantage in security. That founder is Tim through and through, and we can’t wait to see how Anetac transforms the future of identity security in the years to come.