Blog

It's a very special day for us at Hardenize! With today's deployment, we're open for business. The waiting list is gone and our pricing has been revealed. Anyone and everyone who comes to our website can try our product and—if the alignment of values is right—become our customer. We welcome you, and we're looking forward to helping you navigate the maze that is network and application infrastructure security.

We mastered many things in the last five years, but the art of silent launch is definitely one of them. We started in March 2016, had our free assessment up on our website within six months, and had a rough outline of the product within a year. We onboarded the early pilots during 2017. In truth, we launched silently in January 2018 when we signed up our very first two customers—DENIC eG and Internetstiftelsen, the .de and .se registries. We're indebted to Anne-Marie Eklund-Löwinder (Internetstiftelsen) and Boban Kršić (DENIC), who saw in us not what we were, but what we could be.

There were others that helped us, too: Gerhard Eschelbeck, then VP at Google, helped us join their startup program, and Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, put us on their network. We thank them also.

Since 2018, we kept working—talking to our customers, learning from them, and releasing new features on a weekly basis. You can follow our milestones via the posts on our blog, the earliest being from 2017. As the word spread, other customers followed. We grew into a small team and then a small company. We're profitable and growing.

The first phase in the life of any start-up is the search for the product-market fit. We got it.

It took us a couple of years. We started from a desire to help the world adopt the latest security technologies and make themselves more secure. Unfortunately, there are significant obstacles on that path, some of them being lack of time, expertise, and budget. But why should security be reserved just for companies with big pockets? That's the idea behind the free assessment you can get on our website. That's also the idea behind our dashboards and our efforts to document best practices for a wide range of network and application security standards.

The actual product ended up being something different, although it still encompasses our original goals. First, very early on we saw what Certificate Transparency would become and embraced it for continuous discovery and verification of our customers' certificates. That was our small pivot and, as a result, PKI monitoring is one of our strong suits. Our big pivot was toward a fully automated platform for continuous discovery and monitoring of network infrastructures. In essence, we realised that there is a much bigger problem—and one we had to solve before doing anything else—because our customers had enormous difficulties just knowing what infrastructure they have. So we figured out how to help with that and then how to help with knowing what the discovered infrastructure looks like, all in depth and on a daily basis.

We've come a long way since our early days, but there is so much ahead of us as well. You could say that we're just getting started—and we would love it if you joined us on our journey.