Today we announced a $40M Series B fundraise from new investors NEA, joined by existing investors Moore Strategic Ventures and AE Industrial Partners HorixonX. These new funds will help us accelerate momentum, keep innovating with our first of its kind platform in the market, launch additional product features, and expand supported environments to solve even more of our customers’ most pressing cloud challenges. It’s been an exciting year –– from international expansion and customer growth, to end users from around the world accessing applications on the platform, all while growing 2F to a headcount of nearly 100. Add in over threefold year over year revenue growth, sixfold growth in TCV, and tripling our customer base, the momentum is amazing.
And this is only the beginning.
A global movement
Governments around the world are leveraging applications powered by Game Warden. Commercial organizations ranging from publicly traded to fast-growing VC-backed startups use Game Warden to deploy onto government networks. As we continue to expand the variety of commercial and private cloud environments Game Warden can support deployments into, we will increase the volume, variety, and quality of commercial software available to national security and defense organizations around the globe without compromising security.
We were recognized in The Information’s 50 Most Promising Startups, secured multiple prime contracts across the USG, and completed our first deployment on GCP during the October Sky event in Australia. It has been quite a year and the momentum we have built is unbelievable.
A transformed relationship
Why are we experiencing such growth and momentum? We’re fundamentally changing the relationship between commercial software and national security. We see this, and more importantly, our customers and their customers see this through a number of experiences. By providing clear design patterns for application development teams, stable build and security pipelines to support pushes into managed cloud environments, and a simplified CVE mitigation experience, we have dramatically reduced cost, time, and ambiguity from a historically complex and unpredictable path to production in government environments. Coupled with seamless integrations into government IDAMs, highly stable runtime environments, and robust observability stacks with continuous monitoring and penetration testing, national security end users are able to easily consume the cutting-edge applications running on Game Warden without having to trade quality for security. Bringing transparency, stability, and security to the forefront while simplifying deployment and consumption of software has allowed us to transform how the global national security and defense communities engage with commercial software.
A radical vision
Our thesis has always been, and continues to be a simple one: by abstracting security and compliance complexity into a single design pattern, we will unlock a massive market opportunity for the software industry. Unlocking this market provides global defense and national security organizations with an unprecedented opportunity to leverage, integrate, and collaborate with the best software the market has to offer, in their environments and with their tooling — quickly, and without having to make a choice between quality software and security. This will result in new markets, new jobs, and new companies, bringing with them transformational capabilities for national security, public safety, and citizens around the world. It has the power to change how societies interact with their elected governments.
This vision creates a generational impact for global security, and at a personal level, will be the most impactful contribution I have ever made to national security. I could not be more excited.
A 10x team
None of this is possible without a team of absolute tier 1 people. The amount of maturity our team has experienced in the last year, from transforming how we recruit, hire and onboard teammates to how we empower leaders has been amazing. Our collective passion for the mission, obsession with the customer, and commitment to transform this industry is contagious. I am continually blown away by the high degree of trust this team has earned and scaled across the community. The team at 2F is trusted by some of the world’s leading organizations to secure, deploy, and run software around the world, and that trust was built by the amazing humans I have been fortunate enough to work with. We’re excited to continue to grow the team, and to continue finding 10x teammates to solve one of the most important missions of our generation.
What’s next for Second Front
It's still just the beginning of this journey, and we are just getting started. Our vision is to transform the relationship between commercial software and global national security, making it seamless to deploy and consume software in a secure manner. Even with the progress to date, and our global reach, there is so much more to be done.
As we look to the future, there are a number of key themes we are excited to tackle:
- Frictionless cross-environment deployments: Removing the need to refactor as applications are tested, deployed to, and consumed in a myriad of environments across the globe makes processes, timelines, and functional parity highly predictable and dependable.
- Secure-at-birth software: Releasing Game Warden Builder to allow organizations to build secure and compliant software using Game Warden primitives from the first line of code written, increasing the velocity from build to run.
- Transformed edge deployment capabilities: Challenging current approaches to edge and disconnected (or air-gapped) environments and autonomous systems by transforming the path to production for mission applications.
- Empowered government security teams: Leveraging the power of software to enable government security leaders to have unprecedented insight and access into applications running in their environments at the click of a button.
- Consumable cross domain tooling: Ensuring that no matter the environment, high quality tooling is available to support critical missions at home and abroad, across both the USG and our partners and allies.
A big thank you.
It's a privilege to work with the team here at 2F, with our amazing customers, and with their amazing end users. I still remember the first conversation about Game Warden as if it were yesterday. I’ve never been part of such a tremendous team or more excited about a mission than I am here, and we’re so excited for the next phase.
We’re so lucky to have such an amazing cadre of investors and we’re grateful to have NEA joining Moore Strategic Ventures and AE Industrial Partners HorixonX who continue to support the vision we are building upon.
To the global defense and national security community and the commercial software industry, thank you for trusting us to help you achieve your goals, and to enable an amazingly transformed relationship between your communities.
Finally, a huge thank you to Peter Dixon for continuing to trust me to scale the amazing company that he, the late Mark Butler, and Nate Hughes built. It is a privilege I do not take lightly.
To. The. Moon.
— Tyler Sweatt, CEO, Second Front Systems
