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January 2023

The last days of 2022 were buzzing for Leap Grid. Leap Grid has been established as an entity and invested in Opinnate as the seed investor. LeapGrid and Opinnate also signed a framework agreement by which Leap Grid is to provide marketing and international expansion services. 

While the world is going through a historic economic recession, innovative technologies that provide significant CapEx and OpEx savings, and increase business agility will help companies steer safely and stand out during these tough times. After long deliberations, we are fully convinced that OpInnate ticks all the boxes on this front. Technology and the strength of use cases being the first, there are several reasons why we invested in OpInnate.  

Let’s look at the technology first. The days of firewalls being used as a perimeter defence are long gone. Interconnectivity across supply chains, zero trust requirements, a multitude of applications and cloud workloads that are in use, hybrid networks, micro-network segments put “firewalls” at a focal point in networks, orchestrating who talks to who using what application, what device and when. Managing firewall policies, therefore, has become increasingly complex over time.  

There are a handful of policy management vendors out there for some time. The policy management market today is locked in the very large enterprise segment. Positioning across network and security fields is confusing. Even large enterprises that are not short on IT staff struggle to complete a policy management solution deployment quicker than six months, at best.

Opinnate is ready to offer a solution that will fundamentally change the dynamics of the policy management market. While the very large enterprises will be able to address straightforward automation use cases quicker and more easily, the addressable market will expand towards mid-size enterprises, which are currently not in the scope of the existing vendors.  

The open architecture of the platform and potential technology integrations is another angle. Opinnate platform is innately open for technological integrations in a number of different domains, such as firewall, SIEM, SOAR, VM, and ITSM. This open integration approach will help customers get more out of their existing investments in terms of cyber risk reduction, lowering cost, and improving operational efficiency. It will also facilitate customer acceptance and sales efforts.

Opinnate use cases make sense for a variety of go-to-market options and delivery channels. The granular architecture of the solution is great for deploying a freemium and product-led growth strategy. Managed NOC and Managed Security companies can significantly benefit from Opinnate by achieving economies of scale with fewer customers and lowering churn. There are several use cases that other potential delivery partners such as integrators, value-added resellers, assessment and testing companies would tap into.  

Finally, owners make all the difference. Having experienced dozens of use cases and challenges in their long tenures, Serkan and Anil have a crystal clear vision as to what customer problems they want to solve, in the short and long run. While being impressively principled, they are easy and fun to work with and fully dedicated. We are excited to be part of their journey.