Why We Invested in Orion

Today we unveiled to the world that Rahul Thayil and the team at Orion have joined the Dynamo family. We're proud to have led their seed round to grow their AI-powered risk intelligence platform, which enables enterprises to detect, quantify, and act on real-world threats before they escalate. Briefly, we'd like to share why we were excited to invest:

1. A Relentless CEO. We originally met Rahul in 2023 when he was in Techstars and gave him direct feedback regarding his vision and practical elements of the business. Rahul is the epitome of relentless; he lead Orion through many near-death moments as he was further discovering the customer problem, the proper approach to solving it, and conducting early sales. In the process, he even convinced a team of six engineers to continue working with him even though he couldn't cover payroll. Rahul’s persuasiveness is one of the key qualities that we picked up on when spending time with him and those he's worked closely with in the past. Rahul himself has a background in government consulting and risk which is relevant to the mission at Orion.
2. A large customer base with historic under-investment leading to a market creation opportunity. GSOC teams have historically been a cost center and shared resource without sufficient staffing or enablement despite conservative estimates suggested 1.5k GSOC groups across Fortune 1000, health systems, and R1 (large research) universities. As a result, these teams have been reactive and therefore, generally untimely in their risk management activities and protocol. This is evident with the speed at which some of his customers piloted and purchased Orion as well as the decision a major cloud provider undertook to revamp its GSOC team in light of the LA riots. For context, over one-third of respondents expect to increase GSOC spend by 11% or more through 2025 relative to a historical annual industry spend of ~$2B.
3. Tailwinds from increased geopolitical tension, supply chain disruption, regional conflicts, and cyber threats. In a world that is experiencing heightened geopolitical tension, the safety and security of key assets and people has returned to the forefront. The US Chamber of Commerce cited geopolitical tension as a top-tier strategic and financial risk that companies are trying to account for in operations and planning. We see companies establish their internal GSOC around 2K employees with smaller organizations opting for a virtual or outsourced GSOC capability. Note that virtual GSOC revenues are today $1.2B and anticipated to exceed $2B by 2030 (9% CAGR) in the US. The global market is expected to realize revenues of $6B with the potential to double over the last decade.

We're excited by what Orion are building and enabling- safety and security in a world that's quickly changing.