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https://github.com/crowdsecurity/fundraising-decks

Present the slides used for CrowdSec fundraising and explain the business model
https://github.com/crowdsecurity/fundraising-decks

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Present the slides used for CrowdSec fundraising and explain the business model

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README 

          
# Fundraising Slides for CrowdSec

* **Series A**: [Google Drive](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1akI0F7CYqff7xJuPklrQiYE4xymv6bU1FHHjvP9lBLY/edit#slide=id.g12c452509f1_2_41) | [SlideShare](https://www.slideshare.net/CrowdSec/crowdsec-around-deck-35-minpptx)

* **Seed:** [Google Drive](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kYInfq5zgz2S8P2PAAcDRHPfOgfwdJ-ShP02Ug8Tmsw) | [SlideShare](https://www.slideshare.net/CrowdSec/crowdsec-seed-round-deck)

* **Pre-Seed / (Smart Money Round):** [Google Drive](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1H-Gwa8K4UIHeqcLsPaAGNbKHD04k8GHI1ffB5NImNZU/) | [SlideShare](https://www.slideshare.net/CrowdSec/crowdsec-smart-money-round-deck)



You need a team of experts to create an efficient, quality-driven, and valuable product. Their market price is usually high, specifically in cybersecurity (but this is true of most forms of software development lately). 



You cannot simply think the joy of partaking in a FOSS adventure will feed all the mouths in their household. On the other end of the spectrum, companies adopting your FOSS product are investing in it. They want to be sure this product will still be available and maintained over time. For those two reasons, you need, in our book, to hire your developers and pay them well. The best is associating them with shares in the company (which we do at CrowdSec). Quality has to be a cardinal norm, and stability is its vital blood.



Hence, finding a sustainable business model has always been a significant concern for every open source project. How can you provide your product for free and still make money? 



At the same time, specifically in FOSS, the doomed “if it’s free, you’re the product” can (and should) be avoided. CrowdSec takes these questions very seriously and wants to be fully transparent with its community. 



Since the project is deeply rooted in its community, transparency is one of our most important pillars, along with privacy. This is why we decided to publish the slide decks we used to pitch to our investors during our various fundraising campaigns. You will find them in this repository under a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.



We hope those will help you in your adventures, to raise funds, and make FOSS thrive even further and reach new heights. Eventually, it will pave the way for other open source projects to find a sustainable business model and publish their own slide decks.



To our knowledge, this full transparency and sharing of investment decks are among the first of their kind. This is usually a big “No No” in the VC field. The deck is generally associated with other documents like business model, treasury plan, recruitment, go-to-market, go-to-community, etc. Those other decks may follow later on. But this one is still the most important of them all, the entry point that will trigger an investor's interest, the one you’ll show during all your roadshow. We hope it will also answer most of our user’s questions.



We sincerely thank our investors, especially our business angels, Breega and Supernova investment, for their trust and for making this level of transparency possible. 



## The business model we adopted



The CrowdSec community benefits from the FOSS IDS and IPS the company is developing. It will, and has to be, forever the case. The second rule we’ve carved in stone is that if you partake in the detection network by sharing the IP addresses attacking you, you’ll receive in return the list of IP addresses that could aggress you using the same behavior. For free as well.



We monetize in two ways: 

We sell those signals and curated versions for a premium to users willing to pay for those without partaking in the detection network. You either pay for our work with signals, money, or a mix of both.



We offer premium services and extra data on top of the FOSS, for the ones willing to pay. It typically involves:

* Data lake replication to your premises for unlimited access

* API access to CTI datalake or Blocklist datalake

* Premium blocklists we source by other means (either internal effort, manual or automated, or by buying/reselling them from other sources)

Storage of events seen by your IDS in a SaaS console, which also provides CTI capabilities

* Self-monitoring or your IP addresses, private consensus, Zero infrastructure, etc.

* SSO, multi seats, multi-tenancy, etc.

* BGP access to the data

* Capacity to resell signals or to use them for training AIs, etc.

* And of course, premium support, the cornerstone for most clients

## Fund raised so far



CrowdSec is here to last. 



So far, we’ve raised the following rounds:

* 192 K€: Founders investment

* 680 K€: Smart money round. Sum raised from 18 different business angels all regrouped in an SPV to simplify the administrative part (Special Purpose Vehicle, a holding to regroup all BAs)

* 4 M€: Seed round, the sum raised from Breega

* 14.1 M€: A round led by Supernova, where Breega followed up

* A loan from the BPI of 1.9M€

* A grant of 644 K€ from the BPI cybersecurity innovation fund



For a total, 4 October 2022, of 21,5 M€. This sum is enough to enable company sales and, before that, cover the cash burn of the next two years, roughly until around the end of 2024. The sales incomes will then kick in and take the relay of the investor money to carry operations after this date.



*Philippe Humeau, CEO of CrowdSec*



# License



Creative Commons License
Data shared and linked in this repository are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.