Clearwater cybersecurity startup Guardare has raised another $5.6 million to expand its sales operation and accelerate hiring as it prepares for a larger financing round.
After nearly two years developing its software, the company began commercial sales in July 2025 and is now preparing to scale its operations. Co-founder and CEO Lars Letonoff plans to expand the workforce and increase spending on sales and marketing, supported by additional seed capital from existing and new investors.
“We’re at a point now where we’re ready to really start scaling the business, and we need to fund that,” 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.”
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, Letonoff said. Tampa Bay Ventures, DeepWork Capital and the Florida Opportunity Fund joined the latest financing.
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 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.
Identifying those vulnerabilities is only part of the challenge. Businesses already rely on security products that generate warnings about their computers, employees and software, but those systems offer limited visibility into how the findings intersect. An employee laptop that isn’t encrypted, for example, might trigger a high-risk alert without establishing how urgently the IT department needs to respond.
That assessment requires information dispersed across the company’s security infrastructure, including whether the employee has failed phishing tests, completed security training or had login credentials exposed online. The software installed on the laptop also matters, since vulnerabilities in those programs could create additional exposure.
By integrating those systems, Guardare uses artificial intelligence to evaluate the findings collectively, rank vulnerabilities and recommend which problems to address first. Its platform connects with more than 200 technology products, with two or three integrations added each week.
The need for that analysis extends from businesses with 50 employees to multinational corporations, although cybersecurity capabilities vary considerably by organization. Smaller companies may depend on an IT manager who oversees security alongside other responsibilities, while large enterprises can have dedicated teams monitoring operations across multiple divisions.
“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 organization, exactly where it stands.”
That broad market is reflected in Guardare’s customer mix. Small and midsize businesses account for most of its deals, although Letonoff said revenue is roughly evenly distributed across small, midsize and enterprise customers. Expanding that base will require convincing more companies to allocate money for an emerging category of cybersecurity software.
Letonoff encountered a similar commercial challenge at Clearwater-based KnowBe4, where he joined as the third employee and eventually became co-president and chief revenue officer. He helped guide the cybersecurity training company through its public offering and subsequent $4.6 billion acquisition by Vista Equity Partners, experience that now informs his approach to building another market for an unfamiliar product.
“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,” Letonoff 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.”
As prospective customers begin allocating budgets for the software, Guardare is investing in the personnel and product development needed to pursue those opportunities. The company is also operating within a Tampa Bay technology industry that Letonoff has watched evolve through three local startups, beginning with Sunbelt Software and continuing through KnowBe4.
That expansion has deepened the region’s technology talent pool and strengthened the support infrastructure available to early-stage companies, according to Letonoff. 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 on its progress and speaking at events.
“I look now and I look back in the KnowBe4 days early. I mean, there were very few. There were really two significant companies in the area. There was us and ConnectWise,” Letonoff said. “And now, I mean, you have tons of startups. You have ReliaQuest. There’s a huge tech footprint here now, much more so than back then.”