A quarter-billion in revenue makes folks want to talk about growth. I get it. Growth gives you room to build. It lets you make bigger bets, hire more experts, take bigger swings, and reach more of those you set out to help in the first place.
Numbers like that are exciting to see. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but that's not what hits me the hardest.
What hits me is everything behind that number. The businesses that were getting hammered by unchecked adversaries. The years when protecting them at scale felt almost impossible. The partners who helped us reach them (and trusted us while we were still figuring it out). The teammates who rallied behind this work at a breakneck pace, with families behind them making sacrifices most of us will never know. And the investors who believed this was the right thing to do, even when the masses had their doubts.
These are the things I keep coming back to when I see $250M ARR.
The first million was proof of what's possible
Back in 2015, Chris Bisnett, John Ferrell, and I found a cause worth dedicating our lives to—so we took a leap of faith and founded Huntress (then known as Huntress Labs). Along the way, more like-minded misfits joined us, and by 2018, we protected nearly 80,000 businesses and crossed $1M ARR.
Compared to today, that probably sounds small. I promise you it didn't feel small then 😅.
Getting to that point was tough. Really tough. For me, that first million wasn't proof we'd made it, but it was the first real sign that this experiment of ours had legs.
Businesses below the Fortune 500 truly needed what we were building. The community was telling us their pain was real. So we stayed close to the ones we were trying to help and worked like hell not to drift from our purpose. That was the whole point. It still is.
Never stop building for the 99%
Huntress wasn't built to be a glamorous tech darling; we're a die-hard research lab (hence Huntress Labs). Our goal was to educate the masses and bring our expertise to those left behind by large enterprise vendors.
Those with limited budgets, tiny teams (if any team at all), and security tools that created more work than they resolved. We believed every business could thrive, while recognizing that adversaries wanted the opposite. It was an unfair fight that we could level.
I've talked a lot about the cybersecurity "poverty line." Small and mid-sized businesses know they need stronger protection, but the traditional enterprise security model is too expensive, too complicated, and too dependent on headcount they may never have.
While Huntress has grown to support businesses of ALL sizes—our largest accounts secure over 100,000 employees—we'll never forget what sparked our initial fire. Small businesses are the backbone of the global economy. MSPs help keep them alive and executing. For too long, the industry treated both like an afterthought, and I'll be damned to let the market return to its old ways.
That's where our mission came from. It's all about democratizing cybersecurity, making it accessible to all businesses so they can operate with confidence instead of fear.
And, obviously, to wreck hackers.
Growth rarely reveals the whole story
From the outside, Huntress can look like an overnight success story with funding rounds, press coverage, and all that good stuff. I wish it were that easy.
Huntress was a deliberate build of R&D and go-to-market investments designed to compound upon each other—drastically accelerating momentum along the way in preparation for AI-powered organized cybercrime. Each new product, model, or feature acts as a single piece of an enormously complex system, yet it only feels like simple, valuable outcomes to our partners and customers. It took years of grinding to develop a security platform of this scale, and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible.
The same can be said about our ongoing expansion efforts: becoming more accessible to English-tolerant Europe, expanding from ANZ to all of APAC, doubling down on Latin America, and getting more aggressive across North America.
Through our partnerships with MSPs, MSSPs, telcos, printer dealerships, system integrators, insurance providers, resellers, distributors, and Microsoft, we've rallied more than 20,000 badasses who are working together to secure the globe's most at-risk businesses. With that global community bringing Huntress to market—and our deep Microsoft integrations supercharging the solutions most customers are already using—we're becoming the go-to source of security for the companies this industry has overlooked for so long.
I've heard from partners who've described us as "the single most credible solution for the 99%." Huntress is what CrowdStrike represents for the Fortune 500, but built for all the businesses that fall below that threshold. I don't take that lightly.
Each milestone we've hit has come after long stretches of work that almost no one outside the company ever saw. And now we're here, empowering more than 270,000 organizations, 19 million endpoints and identities, and people in 100 countries to go toe-to-toe against the AI-powered adversaries that few saw coming a decade ago.
Words simply won't capture how thankful I feel and how proud I am of all of it. Our teammates, partners, and investors should be too 🙏 .
Yet, despite this success, I never want the scoreboard to distract us from the reason we play this game in the first place.
Don't mistake the money for the mission
Revenue is merely a byproduct of our mission. An important one for sure, but it's still a byproduct.
Revenue and growth only mean something because real people and outcomes are connected to them. I've seen too many companies scale to our size, simply to prioritize revenue growth over service quality and product value. It's a shame this has to be said so bluntly, but I'd walk into traffic before letting our company lose focus on this obvious steel thread that runs through everything we do.
For my partners, customers, and the community reading this:
I need your help and feedback to keep us accountable as we continue to scale. It takes a village, and you play a key role in helping us stay ahead of modern agentic adversaries.
That's how I think about what comes next. Growth and innovation, not for the sake of more revenue, but to better secure always-evolving attack surfaces.
Wrapping up with appreciation
More than 10 years in, this whole thing still feels like a fever dream. It's surreal to watch my teammates wake up each day to fight for the greater good. It's equally exciting to watch them retain our culture of giving back more than we take: freely sharing what they observe in the wild, speaking the truth when staying quiet would be easier, and simply having people's backs when they need it the most.
As I wrap up this business inflection, I hope these countless teammates, partners, investors, and customers understand how much I appreciate the purpose and gravity they've given to my post-military life. The trust they've put in my team since day one isn't lost, and $250M in ARR only adds more weight. Thankfully, there's no team better suited to carry it.
So yes, we're going to celebrate this. We absolutely should. Everyone who's been along for this ride, past and present, has earned this moment. But the work is far from done.
Elevating the 99% is a tall order, and we're still only a fraction of the way there. We've got a long way to go, and we're not stopping anytime soon. There are still too many businesses being asked to punch above their weight. Too many lean IT teams carrying risks they shouldn't have to carry alone. And far too many hackers who've yet to be wrecked.
That's exactly why Huntress exists. We got here because we're relentless about our mission, and we'll keep earning our place by proving it every day.
