Guardare has raised an additional $5.6 million to expand its sales operation and accelerate hiring as it prepares for a larger Series A financing round. After nearly two years developing its software, the Clearwater cybersecurity startup began commercial sales in July 2025 and is now preparing to scale its operations.
“We’re at a point now where we’re ready to really start scaling the business, and we need to fund that,” co-founder and CEO Lars Letonoff said. “We weren’t quite there for a Series A yet, and we didn’t want to get in front of that too soon. So the decision was made to bring in another pocket of money that will comfortably get us to our Series A.”
Guardare funding details and investors
According to an Oct. 7 filing with the SEC, Guardare has sold $10.7 million in equity to 10 investors, up from $5.1 million in June 2025. The company increased the offering to $11.2 million, leaving approximately $480,000 available. Utah-based venture capital firm Album led both rounds, with Ten Eleven Ventures participating in each. Tampa Bay Ventures, DeepWork Capital and the Florida Opportunity Fund joined the latest financing, and Letonoff said the new capital includes additional seed investment from existing and new investors.
Guardare’s growth plans and hiring
The proceeds will support additional sales and software development positions at the 25-employee company, along with increased marketing and public relations spending. Letonoff has not established a specific hiring target, but the investment is intended to broaden Guardare’s customer base for software that prioritizes cybersecurity vulnerabilities according to their potential business impact.
How Guardare’s platform works
Guardare integrates data dispersed across a company’s security infrastructure and uses artificial intelligence to evaluate findings collectively, rank vulnerabilities and recommend which problems to address first. The platform connects with more than 200 technology products, with two or three integrations added each week.
Identifying vulnerabilities is only part of the challenge: security products already generate warnings about computers, employees and software, but they often offer limited visibility into how those findings intersect. For example, an unencrypted employee laptop might trigger a high-risk alert without indicating how urgently IT must respond. Guardare factors in whether the employee failed phishing tests, completed security training, had login credentials exposed online, and what software is installed on the device to assess business impact.
Market fit and commercial challenge
Guardare targets organisations ranging from companies with about 50 employees to multinational enterprises, though cybersecurity capabilities vary widely. “Typically in an SMB, the person that’s in charge of running security has another job,” Letonoff said. “They’re not security professionals. They typically never have a CISO on board, so there’s a huge knowledge gap. With a product like ours, you’re really kind of putting in their hands a 20-year veteran CISO to help them make their security decisions. Now on the enterprise side, it’s a little bit different use case. If I’m the CTO of a large company with several divisions around the planet, I have complete insight into my whole organisation, exactly where it stands.”
Letonoff said small and midsize businesses account for most of Guardare’s deals, although revenue is roughly evenly distributed across small, midsize and enterprise customers. He compared the commercial challenge to his experience at KnowBe4, where new-category products often start as off-budget purchases. “The challenge then and the challenge now is when you’re operating in a new category, it’s typically an off-budget purchase because they didn’t budget for this in the prior year,” he said. “But we are coming full circle on that now. Companies that we spoke to last year are getting it on their budget this year. That’s the same as KnowBe4, so we have the muscle memory to work through that and still successfully make sales.”
Local ecosystem and founder background
Letonoff previously joined Clearwater-based KnowBe4 as the third employee and eventually became co-president and chief revenue officer, helping guide the company through its public offering and its $4.6 billion acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. Guardare participated in Tampa Bay Wave’s cybersecurity accelerator from December 2024 into early 2025, shortly before its public beta, and has remained involved by providing updates and speaking at events.
Letonoff noted the region’s evolving technology footprint, citing Sunbelt Software, KnowBe4 and ConnectWise from earlier days and pointing to newer firms such as ReliaQuest as evidence of a deepened talent pool and stronger support infrastructure for startups.
