A strategic new hire means big things for one of the companies spurring from the Founder’s Factory 10Xelerator program. Video game security software specialists Panopticon Labs recently brought former Director of Information Security, Risk and Security Architecture for Cardinal Health Mark Tomallo on as CEO.
“I met Matt [Cook] and Amy [Szabo] (Panopticon founders) as part of the 10x program and was immediately interested in what they were doing,” Tomallo says. With a background in entrepreneurship, Tomallo was one of the advisors for the program. He’d started and sold two of his own companies before joining Cardinal Health.
While Cardinal Health is one of the largest companies in Central Ohio, “The idea to go to the exact opposite end of the spectrum and deal with a small startup mentality is just great,” Tomallo says. “The energy, the excitement is fantastic.”
For Panopticon it was a hire that rounded out the team they needed and wanted to put in place to grow the operation.
“Matt had been doing all the business development and is really great at building relationships and talking about videogames and the security issues they are facing,” says Panopticon Co-founder Amy Szabo. “We really needed someone who kind of was a salesperson.”
With Tomallo at the helm, Panopoticon plans to spend the next year acquiring more customers.
“Our focus this year is all on sales,” Szabo says. “Our goal is four customers this year.”
Since the accelerator the startup received $100,000 in angel funding from a group of seven investors.
“That allowed us to really start building and reaching out,” Szabo says. Through one-on-one meetings with potential clients, “Matt spent last year really kind of building relationships so we had a lot of warm handoffs Mark has been able to take and run with.”
The investment also helped them land their first client – a large Facebook game publisher. Negotiations are currently under way to extend the contract as well.
Tomallo says their product will continue to be updated, evolved and tweaked as they dig into the large, $66 billion industry that is videoagming and figure out which segments and markets are a best fit.
“These companies have to defend their player population from some really high-tech, organized criminals utilizing some methods that were built five and 10 years ago,” he says. The behavior-based and actual in-game player analysis were lacking, Panopticon saw a need and solution and built it – a factor that was really attractive to Tomallo.
For more information, visit panopticonlabs.com.
