The Inside Story of Why We Invested In Clairvoyant Intel

At 1Flourish, our mission is to back visionary technical founders poised to massively scale human flourishing. When we met Clairvoyant Intel’s founders, Doug Schultz and Gautam Altekar, we were deeply impressed by their cybersecurity experience and vision to empower enterprises to move from a legacy model of “Assumed Trust” of third-party software to “Zero Trust” by verifying software in the release process. The average cost of a data breach was over $5M in 2024 per IBM, and the US government has made zero-trust a spending priority for agencies by 2026.  Furthermore, Clairvoyant gives enterprises unprecedented insight into what the software they plan to deploy will actually do – and the impact it may have for the broader IT and InfoSec environment.

Large enterprises and government organizations store over 30% more data annually into increasingly complex software made by thousands of vendors.  It is exceptionally expensive, slow and risky for these organizations to find and identify unknown cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities before they are exploited by increasingly sophisticated bad actors. To help solve this, the team at Clairvoyant Intel is developing an AI-driven, elegant and effective approach to verify that software is free from impactful unknown adversarial threats and risks before it is approved for deployment.

David Lane discovered the Clairvoyant Intel team through a referral from the ex-CISO of Paypal and American Express, who started a successful company that David had helped fund. David was impressed by the deep industry experience and high personal character of Clairvoyant Intel’s founding team. Doug Schultz was a business leader who had created new markets for unicorn cybersecurity products like FireEye and Menlo Security. Gautam Altekar was a highly technical founder who had already solved extremely hard technical challenges as the chief architect at Menlo Security ($800M valuation in 2020). Gautam co-invented Menlo Security’s patented browser isolation technology that creates a barrier between dangerous web content and private networks.

Seeking a new challenge after working together at Menlo Security, Doug and Gautam interviewed 40 large enterprise and government CISOs about their biggest security concerns. The participants were early adopters of technology and had the budget to test promising new products before they were perfected. The CISOs responded that they had significant risk from all of the third party software being updated and released as witnessed by the repeated infiltration in our third-party software applications (Kaseya, Solarwinds, 3CX, etc) which had gone undetected for months or years until breach. They wanted to verify the integrity of software before deployment so they could reduce reliance on vendor documentation and attestations. Gautam and Doug took these learnings and developed a new cybersecurity approach and platform to proactively and continuously evaluate each application and update, uncovering hidden risks that may not be apparent to vendors themselves.

We have also been impressed by how well Doug and Gautam function as a team. They previously worked together with great success at Menlo Security, and exhibited great co-founder dynamics with strong respect, communication, and core values.  They thought hard about their company culture and lived it out as a demonstration to their customers, employees and investors. Doug and Gautam’s team culture has helped them build strong trusted relationships inside the US government and with international channel partners who could bring significant revenue.

The 1Flourish team has also sought to support Doug and Gautam with more than investment capital. 1Flourish partners have worked with their team on creating strong company culture, human resources, customer acquisition, and fundraising introductions to smart, high character investors.