Logan Alexander Wolfe: Incident Response And Digital Forensics Teams Are Fatigued And Ineffective With Some Of The Highest Burnout Rates In The World

We humanize and de-stress cyber incident response for exhausted InfoSec teams by automating the entire lifecycle with generative AI for all technical and business stakeholders.

Tell us about yourself?

I was always excited about changing the world through technology – I started out by coding video game characters for the Mugen engine when I was about 12, and founded and sold my first two tech companies in AI and B2B driver’s education spaces in 2013 and 2015, then published a few books too.

I developed a keen interest in cybersecurity in my teens or so, as I’ve recognized that it’s the one thing that proliferates across just about any industry nowadays, and improving it sends ripples across all aspects of a business.

As a result, I was fortunate to find myself coordinating cybersecurity in key airports (San Francisco International), during major mergers (McKesson and Rexall), and in leadership positions at Deloitte and EY before starting ORNA.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Do your thing, and don’t care too much about the people’s opinions – it doesn’t matter to them as much as you think.

What problem does your business solve?

Incident response and digital forensics teams are fatigued and ineffective with some of the highest burnout rates in the world, yet their importance cannot be overstated: it’s not enough to detect a cyberattack – what happens next is what truly matters.

Three main issues are to blame: the lack of user-friendly tools, the lack of clear processes and their automation, and the lack of holistic aggregation. At ORNA, we’ve set out to solve all three in one fell swoop.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Frankly, our vision is to make the job of cyber incident responders everywhere suck less. They are a true last frontier in the face of cyber threats everywhere, and are often the unsung heroes of the cyber resilience story.

With all 3 founders having extensive expertise in this field, we know firsthand how demanding and stressful it often is, so we wanted to create a tool that works its magic to strike the balance between practicality and usability throughout.

What is your magic sauce?

We are all about creating an intuitive AI-powered incident response platform for people that will actually be using it.

There are plenty of expensive, complex tools on the market, and it’s unfair that incident response teams have to fight these tools every day in an already stressful situation. We take a different, human-centric approach.

The responders’ needs are at the centre of the ORNA experience. Best-in-class UX, tasteful AI-driven automations, 24/7 subject expertise support – not just customer support – with a 15-minute max response time, hundreds of native integrations, predictable pricing, and instant ROI within 5 minutes of signup define the platform.

Something else that’s unique to ORNA is our ability to bring all aspects and stakeholders of cyber incident response together in a collaborative environment.

Instead of catering to InfoSec teams exclusively, ORNA covers business risk, HR, communications, compliance, legal, and even third party aspects – something that’s very novel to the industry. Ultimately, I think this focus and positioning resonates with our target audience.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

We are scaling at lightning speed with 60+ enterprise customers and revenues well into seven figures just 8 months since ORNA launched, winning numerous awards and tech challenges, such as Global Omnium’s Tech Challenge 2022. As a result, ORNA is gaining a lot of traction in Europe as well, with us currently rolling out a pilot in 400+ European cities to protect critical infrastructure from geopolitical threats.

With our growth trajectory, we are well-positioned to be a US, Canada and EMEA market leader in Incident Case Management (ICM) tools in a few years.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

We are entering the market at an interesting time. In anticipation of the coming recession, all top cybersecurity companies experienced lower-than-usual deal flow this year. On the other hand, data breaches have increased by a whopping 70% since Q2.

Given that the cyberattack numbers were already abysmal, this is a staggering statistic. However, this underscores the fact that cyber incidents are uncorrelated with the state of the financial markets, thus spending on solutions and services will rebound and grow due to the existential nature of the threat.

For us, the recent months brought significant successes in positioning and GTM strategy as we used this period to ensure our future growth and substantially improve the platform per customer feedback.

We’re clearly onto something here, as while most competitors are experiencing a slowdown, we are on track to make the list of top 10 fastest-growing North American startups in 2022 in our first year.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We’d love to work more actively with governments worldwide, particularly in the US, Canada and Europe, and large technology partners like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and so on.

It’s a well-known fact that gaining early traction is tough for any startup, and such collaborations are a clear win-win for both parties here, considering how easily ORNA fits into existing solutions, services and the related infrastructure.

In the spirit of the above, we recently launched a very lucrative Partner program (https://www.orna.app/partners) and rolled out a 100% free ORNA tier to ease adoption for anyone who needs it (https://dashboard.orna.app/signup).