NowSecure, formerly viaForensics, is taking on Silicon Valley — and the world — the Midwestern way.
“We moved to Oak Park back in 2009 because of the schools,” said Chee Young-Kim during a recent interview in the Lake Street offices of the mobile security firm that just completed a $12.5 million Series A funding round.
Young-Kim, a graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a DePaul MBA, co-founded the company formerly known as viaForensics along with her husband, Andrew Hoog.
NowSecure began as a security services provider but has rapidly pivoted toward mobile security product development. The company’s most popular product, a phone app called NowSecurity Mobile, available on both Apple and Android devices, has been downloaded in 188 countries.
“It will track how secure your device is, how often you go through unencrypted traffic and where these devices are sending your information,” Young-Kim said.
“For instance, when I was using the app, it was saying I was sending my info to Ireland. I had no idea what this meant,” she said. “As it turns out, Facebook has a server in Ireland that’s sending all of my information there. So you’ll gain a lot of knowledge about the phone by downloading the app.”
She and Hoog weren’t content with sacrificing family life to the often cutthroat demands of staying competitive in the tech field. So they merged the two.
Instead of moving to one of the coasts, or even setting up shop in downtown Chicago — places where they could benefit from being clustered with like-minded competitors — the couple settled in the artsy suburb famous for an architect and a novelist; not exactly a Silicon Valley.
“We both have little ones,” said Young-Kim. “Back then, Oak Park was one of the first communities to offer full kindergarten classes. That work-life balance was really important to us, so we decided to come here.”
That decision seems to be yielding tremendous dividends. This year, the company was ranked #760 among the 5,000 fastest growing companies in America by Inc. Magazine. In 2013, the firm raked in more than $3.1 million in revenues, a 600 percent growth rate over three years. It was also named to Inc.’s list of the Top 20 Security companies in 2014.
Young-Kim said that NowSecure has benefited from Chicago’s nascent tech boom.
“Chicago is starting to really be a strong support system,” she said. “You have incubators like 1871 and Techstars. Although we weren’t part of that, the city offers a lot of support. There’s also the Illinois Technology Association, which is a fantastic organization for tech companies.”
NowSecure was founded not as an idea, but as a real company operating in the real economy, not the relatively abstract speculative atmosphere of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The company’s foundation in the real economy has allowed for an organic transition from a service-oriented firm to one focused on product development.
“We did the startup the old fashioned way,” Young-Kim said. “We started servicing real clients and as we started seeing the needs of our clients, we realized they needed a better solution than a service solution, so we started to prioritize the mobile security services we were providing.”
“Unlike traditional mobile security offerings that simply scan for known malicious code, NowSecure is a truly comprehensive security platform for managing mobile risk,” said Hoog.
“We actually identify vulnerabilities before they become a problem, through forensics, security testing, malware analysis, endpoint protection and ultimately mobile intel data,” he noted.
Young-Kim insisted that the company will still maintain a small foothold in the service business if only to glean valuable feedback from its clientele.
“That’s what keeps our ear to the ground with respect to what our customers need,” she said. “We take that information and feedback and try to prioritize it.”
During this most recent financing phase, NowSecure, which was founded with bootstrapped funds, had been courted by venture capitalists (VCs) on both the East and West coasts. However, it was the Midwestern VCs that seemed to value most the company’s vision.
“At the end of the day, the Midwest VCs were the ones who really pursued us and understood what we were trying to go for as a company,” Young-Kim said.
NowSecure’s $12.5 million financing round was led by Milwaukee-based Baird Capital’s Venture Capital group, with participation from Jump Capital and Math Venture Partners, both based in Chicago.
Young-Kim said the $12.5 million will go toward hiring 35 additional employees and expanding the firm’s sales, marketing and product development operations. Currently, NowSecure employs around 50 people, about 30 of whom live in Oak Park. The firm also employs people who work remotely from countries such as Spain, Russia and Italy.