Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it fair to say that your solution goes to market through the MSSPs?

Aimei Wei: That’s one type and accounts for 50% of our business. On the other hand, we do have enterprises that operate on their own, for example, higher education, government, or financial institutions.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to discuss those two businesses separately. Let’s start with MSSP. What is happening in the MSSP world right now in terms of how you go to market with them? When you start an MSSP relationship, do they immediately offer you to all their customers?

Aimei Wei: It’s definitely multi-tenant. We built multi-tenant from the very beginning. This can be hosted by MSSPs themselves. We also have a SaaS offering where we will manage it as a platform and they will focus on the security services. The business model is subscription-based. We are a solution provider. They provide the service to the customer.

Sramana Mitra: When you have these mid-sized enterprises that you’re servicing through the MSSPs, the subscription revenue is going to the MSSPs and the MSSPs are paying you.

Aimei Wei: Right. We do have cases where our direct customers approached us. We connect them with our master MSSP and they will service this customer.

Sramana Mitra: How many of the top hundred MSSPs are working with you?

Aimei Wei: We have 20 to 25.

Sramana Mitra: How much business do they generate? How much does each MSSP generate?

Aimei Wei: It’s a big range. Our average deal size is around $100,000 ARR.

Sramana Mitra: MSSP deal size or customer deal size?

Aimei Wei: MSSP deal size. We do have bigger MSSPs. The exciting thing is, we see our MSSPs growing their businesses. We are more of a software solution provider. We also do a lot of enablement to help the MSSP grow.

Sramana Mitra: I’m hearing this from a lot of cybersecurity startups right now. They are going to market through MSSPs. Part of what’s happening is that on the enterprise side, there are so many cyber security providers right now that it’s becoming impossible for them to keep track of and evaluate.

Unless it’s one of the top vendors, it’s hard for them to work with these vendors. A lot of startups are going to market through MSSPs. Then they can get access to lots of mid-market customers through this channel. This is a strategy that is coming up again and again in my conversations with startup founders.

Aimei Wei: That’s definitely great to know. When you see several thousand companies, I can totally understand that it’s extremely hard. It’s very hard to validate what exactly is the product doing right.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider your direct competitors?

Aimei Wei: There are some vendors like X-beam and the more legacy providers. We also compete with NDR vendors because we have very strong NDR capabilities. We also grab business from them because they’re only focused on NDR. People also want this XDR. XDR is much more effective than just one aspect of your attack surface. We haven’t seen much competition from the EDR side. They are also starting to build an XDR platform like Sentinel One and CrowdStrike.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Stellar Cyber CoFounder and CTO Aimei Wei
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