Summary:
Minimus, a cybersecurity startup from Baton Rouge, has raised $51 million in seed funding and gained over 1,200 users since its April launch.
The company focuses on eliminating software vulnerabilities before they exist by rebuilding open-source building blocks from scratch.
Founded by John Morello, who previously co-founded Twistlock, sold to Palo Alto Networks for nearly $500 million in 2019.
Minimus's approach can reduce security risks and management efforts by over 98%, targeting sectors like finance and healthcare.
With offices in multiple global cities, Minimus aims to become a ubiquitous standard in software development worldwide.
Minimus: From Louisiana Roots to Global Cybersecurity Leader
From an unassuming office in Perkins Rowe, a cloud security startup has managed to secure $51 million in seed funding and attract more than 1,200 users since its official launch in April.
The company—called Minimus—offers a suite of tools aimed at eliminating software vulnerabilities before they exist. Though it's headquartered in Baton Rouge, it also has offices in New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Co-founder and CTO John Morello, a Louisiana native and LSU graduate, spent 15 years at Microsoft before co-founding a cloud security company called Twistlock in 2015. Twistlock built its customer engineering team at LSU's Innovation Park and quickly became a leader in the cloud security space.
By the time Twistlock was acquired by Silicon Valley's Palo Alto Networks for nearly $500 million in 2019, it was serving 40% of Fortune 100 companies, including household names like Disney and Starbucks.
Minimus itself got its start in 2022, though it went by Gutsy at the time. When Gutsy announced that it was establishing its headquarters in Baton Rouge in 2023, it was celebrated as a significant milestone for Baton Rouge's growing tech sector.
The company, which rebranded as Minimus ahead of its formal launch earlier this year, claims to offer a solution to the endless treadmill of cloud software vulnerabilities by simply preventing the vast majority of those vulnerabilities from ever existing.
Most organizations currently rely on open-source software building blocks that typically include extraneous components, leading to hundreds of vulnerabilities. Minimus rebuilds those blocks from scratch, stripping out anything that isn't essential.
The result is software that comes with dramatically fewer weaknesses. By using Minimus's building blocks, users can reduce their risk and the amount of work to manage that risk by 98-plus percent.
Minimus has attracted users in heavily regulated sectors like finance, health care, and government. The company now employs about 50 people across its four offices.
Looking forward, Morello hopes Minimus will become a standard part of how software is built worldwide, aiming for ubiquity in the software development process.
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