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<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Robin Saluoks is co-founder and acting CIO of the climate technology company eAgronom." height="3574" width="4765" msid="93060919" hostid="261" sizebytes="1044870"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Robin Saluoks is cofounder and CEO of eAgronom, a climate technology company based in Estonia that helps farmers break into sustainable production.</li><li>In a recent interview with Insider, Saluoks gave us a bird's eye view of his company's journey and his approach to driving innovation. </li></ul>Robin Saluoks is cofounder and CEO of climate technology company eAgronom, which helps farmers build more sustainable businesses using AI and other innovative technologies. The company has more than 1,500 agribusiness customers managing 1m+ hectares of land across Europe. In a recent interview with Insider, Saluoks gave us a bird's eye view of his company's journey and his approach to driving innovation for local farmers:<h3>What is the biggest business challenge you're facing at the moment, and how are you tackling it?</h3>One of the biggest business challenges we face is finding ways to better connect stakeholders working on genuine climate targets with partners who work on projects that sequester CO2 from the atmosphere. More specifically, we are working with farmers who want to bring sustainable changes to their farms but struggle to do so in a way that makes sense for them in the short term and profitably.<h3>How does tech help you drive innovation?</h3>We are developing tools to calculate emissions on farms and verify if the data is correct to produce <keyword id="14530199" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="carbon-credits" source="Orion">carbon credits</keyword> aligned with guidelines. Our core technology revolves around data collecting and data verifying tooling for land use management, which is easy for farmers to plug in and perform their own data analysis for measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV). We also integrate machine learning and satellite monitoring into our platform to make data more robust.<h3> What are your current growth plans?</h3>Earlier this year, we raised a Series A round of funding to help us optimize the farmer onboarding process, set up new global dealerships, and launch the eAgronom Carbon Program. We have also launched a program to finance high-quality carbon sequestration projects by pre-purchasing the credits, so that farmers and landowners no longer need to wait for five years or more to receive the funds and can get started on future-proofing their farms today.<h3>Who do you partner with internally and externally to drive business and tech decisions?</h3>As a climate tech working in farm management, we have always believed that it should be farmers first. As we scale and partner with other business stakeholders, we continue to work hand-in-hand with farmers to understand their needs and deliver practical solutions. Dealing with solutions for the climate, we also work with scientists from different universities and data experts to avoid greenwashing and strengthen genuine climate commitments. We are engaging with highly-credible external auditors to verify the Carbon Removal Units (CRUs), as well as organizations that set carbon accounting standards.<h3>How excited are you about the technology of the future and what it means for your business and your sector?</h3>As an optimist, I see enormous growth opportunities ahead in the agritech and climate tech sectors. Brilliant solutions are being developed across the industry — from carbon sequestration and storage to green energy solutions — and not just on the technology side. We are also seeing a major integration of agroecological knowledge in the industry. For me, this is an excellent sign that more people from different backgrounds are collaborating to produce solutions ready to be used in the market.

Cofounder and CEO of climate technology company eAgronom uses 'farmers first' mindset to drive innovation and lower barriers to sustainable agriculture

<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Tamas Kadar - founder and acting CIO of SEON" height="2536" width="3382" msid="93011506" hostid="261" sizebytes="171526"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="14510314" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="seon" source="Orion">SEON</keyword>, a <keyword id="14510315" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="fraud-prevention" source="Orion">fraud prevention</keyword> service, is Hungary's most well-funded tech startup ever. </li><li>Founder and CIO Tamas Kadar uses an ethos of self-reliance and strong partnerships to drive innovation.</li></ul>Tamas Kadar is the 28-year-old founder and acting CIO of Anglo-Hungarian SEON, the world's fastest growing fraud prevention business. After recently receiving a $94m series B from IVP, SEON is Hungary's most well-funded tech start-up ever. The business is at an important moment in its growth journey, having secured $94m of Series B funding investment, led by Silicon Valley-based IVP back in April 2022. It's in hyper-scale. "As a business, our current priority is to rapidly scale up operations, while also entering new markets and geographic territories," Kadar said. "To do this, we're actively pursuing talent acquisition and bolstering our company ranks with amazing new team members weekly, supporting further growth for SEON." SEON aims to be the fraud prevention choice for online businesses accepting new customers, a big market segment. "More than anything, our aim is to help eradicate online fraud," he said. "I hate to say it, but in general, right now, fraudsters are winning the war online. Too many businesses are losing out to fraudulent activity, and it's our mission to make sure that ends as soon as possible."SEON's mission is a global one. This year, the company opened an office in Austin, Texas as part of its plans to further develop the brand in the US and triple the size of its US team. "Additionally," Kadar said, "we will look to make further inroads within the APAC region, and of course continue to reaffirm our position in <keyword id="11897120" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="europe" source="Orion">Europe</keyword>, with our commercial HQ in London. LATAM expansion will come later in the year."The economic downturn means that fraud is only going to increase. "As such, businesses now need to proactively invest in defense before the problem worsens," Kadar said. "Ultimately, this changing market dynamic has to affect how businesses evaluate online fraud. Moving forward, businesses will be unable to simply absorb company losses as they may have before."Online fraud is a real cat-and-mouse game. "We're continually investing in technologies that allow us to scale across industries and geographic territories," Kadar said. From the beginning, the company's approach to core tech has been to build your own. This, he said, "has allowed our system to be highly flexible. To support this, we've also had to form strong partnerships in the spaces relevant to our <keyword id="11893017" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="technology" source="Orion">technology</keyword>, which have helped us to further expand our capabilities across several markets." This support includes the likes of Revolut, NuBank, and mollie, all at the cutting edge of their respective fields. Kadar is excited about where new tech will take the company and the industry. "In many ways, it feels like we're on the precipice of a new era of technology, which may be dominated by more immersive experiences and decentralised solutions," he said. "As a fan of technology, this prospect really excites me. I think in the next few years we'll start to see big changes in the ways we connect with one another online, whether that be through the <keyword id="11121339" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="metaverse" source="Orion">metaverse</keyword>, or from some of the Web 3.0 solutions coming to the fore." However, he warned, "this industry excitement must be tempered with a recognition that effective fraud prevention protocols will soon be more important than ever."

Founder and CIO of Hungary's most-funded tech startup uses ethos of self-reliance and strong partnerships to drive innovation

<a href="https://businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Nvidia's Senior Director of Corporate Responsibility Tonie Hansen" height="921" width="1229" msid="92908943" hostid="261" sizebytes="45534"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Tonie Hansen is the director of corporate responsibility at the chip giant <keyword id="11897493" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="nvidia" source="Orion">Nvidia</keyword>.</li><li>Hansen told Insider that vast amounts of <keyword id="11896265" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="data" source="Orion">data</keyword> drive the company's innovation efforts.</li></ul>Tonie Hansen, the director of corporate responsibility at the chip company Nvidia, knows that the jargon of innovation can be confusing. Abbreviations like ESG — which stands for environment, social, and governance aspects of investment — can make it hard for firms to understand where to start.So Hansen's first move when joining Nvidia in 2006 was to start internally, changing the workplace culture to make corporate responsibility easier to understand.The guiding principle for Hansen's team at Nvidia is approachable innovation that builds a better society. She said tech innovation directly relates to issues like company culture, climate change, and medical research, and so an understanding of stakeholder interests and how industry peers approach those issues is important."I see my role as one helping the company stay smart on social and environmental topics," Hansen said.Hansen's team collects data on which innovations to prioritize by conferring with customers, partners, and shareholders. They do research, conduct surveys, and lead comparison exercises to see what other chip firms are doing."We wouldn't be able to pull all that information together if we didn't have those deep relationships and that trust that goes both ways," she said.With the data they collect, Hansen and her department create reports for people within the firm to develop products. But she said much of the impact of the reports is how the information gets framed to stakeholders. Investors want to hear both why the product is good for business and how it's socially responsible.Previous reports have led to changes in product design, like how the company builds chips that process graphics."If you truly want to be a value to society, you need to be financially of value, and then you need to actually create technology that benefits and run your company in a socially and environmentally friendly way," she said.Hansen said the goal is for these innovations to have real-world effects. For example, in late March 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Nvidia offered free access to its software to help further researchers' understanding of the virus.Rommie Amaro at the University of California at San Diego used Nvidia's Clara Discovery artificial-intelligence computing platform to model how the virus functions. The team won <a href="https://www.acm.org/media-center/2020/november/gordon-bell-special-prize-covid-research-2020">the Gordon Bell Prize</a>, a top award in supercomputing, for the progress it made toward understanding the virus.Hansen said she plans to keep pushing Nvidia to make tech innovations with long-lasting societal effects. "It's always the anchors of the people and technology for us," she said.

How a corporate-responsibility exec at Nvidia uses data to drive tech innovation that's good for investors and society alike

<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Stormy Peters is wearing a black blazer, black blouse, here hands are clasped on a black table." height="3062" width="4082" msid="92861904" hostid="261"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Stormy Peters, <keyword id="12924965" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="github" source="Orion">GitHub</keyword>'s VP of communities, is a believer that open source can improve the world.</li><li>Firms like GitHub help eliminate barriers to creating software, Peters told Insider.</li></ul>Open-source-software development can make the world a better place, according to Stormy Peters, the vice president of communities at GitHub.That was demonstrated by the developer response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of the outbreak, developers everywhere jumped into open-source software. <a href="https://newamericafoundation.github.io/pandemic-response-repository/projects/covid-19-incarceration-model/">Interactive models</a> projected the effects of the disease in prisons, <a href="https://newamericafoundation.github.io/pandemic-response-repository/projects/covid-19-remote-monitoring-platform/">self-monitoring tools</a> helped healthcare employees care for patients remotely, and a <a href="https://newamericafoundation.github.io/pandemic-response-repository/projects/neighbor-express/">volunteer-matching system</a> connected community volunteers with at-risk people.Those GitHub-based projects proved the open-source community's quick collaboration could be used to solve fundamental issues and transform the world of software, Peters said. Now she wants to make it easier for everyone to create cloud software for good. At GitHub, she's leading projects like GitHub Education to give free open-source resources to students and teachers, and Sponsors, which lets patrons donate to the developers behind open-source projects."It's fun to work with, like, all of our maintainers in open-source-software communities because everyone sees different solutions," Peters told Insider. "Some are obviously more altruistic than others, but they're all like about using technology to solve a problem that we have."Solving those problems starts with making it easier for people to create projects and grow communities around them. Companies like GitHub are responsible for eliminating barriers, including finding projects to contribute to and compensating people for their time, Peters said.And Peters' role in that includes the innovation behind features for developers. For example, she led the team in charge of Achievements, a project that celebrates actions on GitHub and supports developer recognition. She's also proud of her team's work on Discussions, a forum designed for users to ask and answer questions on open-source projects."I think our work is about making it possible for people to create software and the solutions they need and focus on that by providing them tools that make it easier to do," Peters said.Peters said she's particularly passionate about <a href="https://education.github.com/">GitHub's Education</a> project. She's in charge of making new ways to support the 2 million students and teachers who use the product. Peters helped launch Global Campus, a program that allows teachers and students to access GitHub's premium features for free.Recently, the company also made its artificial-intelligence-based pair programmer, GitHub Copilot, and its online development environment, <a href="https://github.blog/changelog/2022-05-09-global-campus-now-available-for-teachers/">Codespaces, free for students</a>. Tools like Codespaces were created so that all students could start learning to code, regardless of whether they had access to a computer.Making these tools widely available for educators and students is game-changing because it gives those who want to participate in open source a chance to do so, Peters said. Overall, Peters' focus is on making it easier for the world to develop in the open, which includes finding ways to get people involved."The open-source community is unique because the opportunity for innovation can happen anywhere. It doesn't matter your résumé. What matters is that your idea is heard and felt by the community, making an impact," Peters said. "I believe the power of creating things is in supporting those that want to implement awesome things, and in collaborating on them."

GitHub's head of communities explains how its big push into AI and cloud will help educate a new generation of developers &mdash; and get them paid

<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="headshot of Ravin Jesuthasan, global leader for transformation services at consulting firm Mercer" height="1800" width="2400" msid="92707832" hostid="261"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Ravin Jesuthasan leads <keyword id="12491616" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="transformation" source="Orion">transformation</keyword> services at <keyword id="14385667" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="mercer" source="Orion">Mercer</keyword> and writes books on the future of work.</li><li>The foundation of <keyword id="11893018" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="innovation" source="Orion">innovation</keyword> is leading with the work, not the technology, according to Jesuthasan.</li></ul>The future of work has become an all-encompassing buzzword, representing everything from automation to working remotely. But at its core, the future is about breaking jobs down to their essential duties. That's according to Ravin Jesuthasan, the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer who has written several books on the future of work."It's essentially going to a much more granular level of analysis than just this thing called a job," he told Insider. Jesuthasan works with tech leaders and other business stakeholders to find opportunities for innovation. Thinking about jobs on a task-by-task basis leaves more room for innovating, according to Jesuthasan. In his eyes, understanding the essential duties of a job can best help stakeholders decide if artificial intelligence, automation, or another form of work is best for the gig. Jesuthasan said the foundation of innovation is leading with the work, not the technology.Jesuthasan's role in the process is changing how businesses view work first, then connecting internal stakeholders to make that change happen. According to Jesuthasan, when companies view the tech and the work as a binary relationship, businesses miss out on a much bigger opportunity on how the tech can augment the work. "They also miss out where the particular tech could potentially transform an entire process or a workflow," he said. For example, workplaces don't have to decide between automating a process and hiring a worker to do it. Instead, management can use a combination of both options by automating the repetitive tasks alongside a worker hired for parts of the role that tech can't do. It's tech and human work combined, not choosing between one and the other.This process reaches beyond any single department to connect tech leaders with other parts of the organization like human resources. HR is largely responsible for guiding the future of work principles that business-technology leaders can help implement, like where tech can boost productivity. The future of work goes hand in hand with <keyword id="14385668" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="digitalization" source="Orion">digitalization</keyword>, too, Jesuthasan said. Digitalization includes everything from automation to enabling tech that improves transparency and the effectiveness of workers. He said it's the digital enablement of the entire business model that's crucial to supporting a workplace of the future.Innovation doesn't always mean buying and implementing the hottest tech on the market. According to Jesuthasan, tech leaders can help businesses solve problems innovatively by using resources already available. That's where he works with tech stakeholders to drive innovative approaches to work. Those stakeholders include the individuals responsible for third-party vendor relationships, those responsible for <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="enterprise" source="Orion">enterprise</keyword> applications, and business partners for specific functions. "Given the proliferation of options related to robotic-process automation, machine learning, natural-language processing, IT has a real insight into where are we using maybe some of these solutions in other parts of the organization," Jesuthasan said. Large companies usually have a disconnect between departments and where they're using vendors. Jesuthasan helps leaders across companies, including tech, solve work issues by connecting those departments. For example, if one department is already using a third-party automation product, it may have enough excess capability to solve a problem in another department. Jesuthasan prioritizes the work first before the tech that a business is already using to better tailor innovation to its needs."The concepts we developed are great, but we need to ensure they work for that particular organization," he said.Sometimes a prototype or introducing new technology will be necessary for innovation if there's a process bottleneck, a shortage of talent, or an opportunity to cut costs, Jesuthasan added. Even in those cases, however, the work comes first. "When they lead with the tech, they miss out on where the tech could really substitute human work," said Jesuthasan.

How researcher Ravin Jesuthasan helps businesses innovate by putting work before technology

<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Sign-Speak CEO and Co-founder Yamilet Payano" height="601" width="800" msid="92554468" hostid="261"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Sign-Speak aims to use machine learning to make communicating through sign language easier.</li><li>Cofounder Nikolas Kelly's own challenges communicating while deaf prompted the idea.</li><li>The software translates between English and sign language and is now in some zoos and restaurants.</li></ul>When Nikolas Kelly got a potential cofounder — Yamillet Payano — on a video call to hear out his startup idea, the circumstances of their meeting alone turned out to be enough of a sales pitch.Kelly, who is deaf, had an idea to create software that would translate sign language for non-speakers in real time with machine learning. When the two met virtually, Payano and Kelly had difficultly communicating since she didn't know sign language, and Zoom's caption service didn't offer <keyword id="13620624" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="american-sign-language" source="Orion">American Sign Language</keyword>, or ASL, translation. Payano eventually asked if there was an easier and more accessible way to chat virtually. There wasn't, and that was Kelly's point."You find that thing that you know you're supposed to do, and you get this epiphany moment of, 'I need to do something about this problem,'" Payano told Insider. "That's what happened to me."Together, with help from Kelly's friend Nicholas Wilkins — who was working as a software engineer for Google at the time — they started Sign-Speak. According to the <a href="https://www.who.int/health-topics/hearing-loss#tab=tab_2">World Health Organization</a>, there are nearly 430 million people globally who are deaf or have disabling hearing loss. Despite this, Payano said that a lack of sign-language datasets is just one of the reasons why translation products like theirs haven't reached the mainstream. Now, Sign-Speak is building its own dataset of ASL signs to power its translation. The software — which is designed to work with any camera-enabled device — currently only supports English, but the company has plans to expand to other languages. "Think of us as like Siri for deaf people," Payano explained.Sign-Speak ran a beta test in late 2021 at a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, to assist customers with ordering. Tablets with Sign-Speak's software provided spoken translation as customers signed orders to enable them to easily interact back and forth.Earlier this year, Sign-Speak also tested the product at a zoo in Rochester, New York, to help guide visitors. At both locations, Payano said an average of 90 people a day used the software, allowing businesses to better serve a community they hadn't considered before. The tests have both ended, but Sign-Speak hopes to launch with some enterprises and small businesses sometime this year."They didn't have to write back and forth. They didn't have to beg, plead. They didn't have to come overly prepared," Payano said. "Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals felt seen for the first time."Having to be overly prepared, according to Payano, means that deaf and hard-of-hearing people understand certain businesses are not designed to serve them. She cited banks as an example of businesses that deaf and hard-of-hearing clients feel do not accommodate for them. In 2011, Wells Fargo settled an Americans with Disability Act, also known as ADA, complaint from the US Department of Justice alleging that the bank refused to do business with deaf clients. Payano envisions a future where Sign-Speak could deploy its software in banks to help ease transactions with deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.Currently, many deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals rely on translators, lip reading, and writing notes on paper to engage with different businesses. Having translators and interpreters can be cost-prohibitive, Payano said. Still, Sign-Speak says it doesn't want to replace translators and interpreters, but rather serve deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in more accessible ways. Above all, Payano said the company has a responsibility to the community it serves. This also means expanding the technology so that people can use sign-language translation anywhere. Payano talked about a future where two people — one deaf or hard-of-hearing, and one not — will be able to communicate on a train platform using an app. As any company grows, Payano says it's important to remember the intent around a product and who that product is serving."We believe in building with the deaf community, not for the deaf community," she said. "And we have a long way to go."

Meet the CEO tapping machine translation to make the world more accessible to people with hearing loss

<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Jen Bennett Google" height="1995" width="2661" msid="92443640" hostid="261" sizebytes="153988"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="11892740" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="google" source="Orion">Google</keyword> <keyword id="11896309" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="sustainability" source="Orion">sustainability</keyword> lead Jen Bennett helps the company plan its sustainability strategy.</li><li>Google has also worked with customers like UPS and Unilever to become more energy efficient.</li><li>Bennett helps customers narrow down where they can be most impactful in becoming more sustainable.</li></ul>With the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/planet-warming-carbon-dioxide-levels-highest-human-history-2022-6">planet heating up</a>, executives and customers have sustainability efforts to minimize the impacts of climate change on their minds.Still, it can be tough for companies to collect the data they need to prioritize which technologies to focus their efforts on. That's where Jen Bennett — Google's sustainability lead — steps in. In her role as a technical director at Google's office of the chief technology officer, Bennett works with Google's engineering teams and customers to determine how companies can invest in technology to support their sustainability strategies. Oftentimes, it's good for business, too, she told Insider."A key part of my mission is to understand being a technologist and entertaining different technologies, and how we pair it up and match it to priorities in business," Bennett said.Increasingly, hitting sustainability goals has <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/green-cloud-sustainability-alibaba-google-microsoft-aws-2021-12">become a battleground</a> for cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The cloud giants can use sustainability to attract customers interested in reducing their carbon footprints, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/green-cloud-sustainability-alibaba-google-microsoft-aws-2021-12">experts say</a>.A <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/new-survey-reveals-executives-views-about-sustainability">survey</a> that Google Cloud commissioned with Harris Poll showed that roughly two-thirds of nearly 1,500 executives interviewed consider environmental, social, and governance initiatives that invest in the ethical impact of a company to be top priorities. That's why Google <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-next-launches-sustainability-products-aws-2021-10">set a goal</a> to have net-zero emissions across all its operations, giving it both more sustainable operations and a competitive edge. To do this, the search giant has invested in renewable energy and machine-learning technologies to make its data centers and cloud more energy efficient.Google plans to extend those sustainability efforts to its corporate customers, too. Google aims to help customers gather the data they need to understand their emissions to make better decisions.Companies may bring a problem — like how to use less energy — to Google, and Bennett's team strategizes how to use technology to solve that problem. For example, customers would better understand when it's effective to move their applications to more efficient data centers, or shut down projects that are no longer running but still use computing power. When Google first started working with the delivery firm UPS, its goal was to improve its delivery costs by using its technology for better routing. The firms were also able to reduce fuel consumption by 10 million gallons of gas per year, Bennett said."Historically, we might have seen sustainability and climate action as sort of the purview of activists," Bennett said. "What we're starting to see is there are many cases where sustainability is actually the right business. It's good for business and the planet."<h2>Google approaches sustainability by focusing on what's most impactful first</h2>Sustainable decision-making can be complicated, especially with so many stakeholders involved throughout the process, according to Bennett. Bennett not only works with Google's core-sustainability team, but also partners with the finance, product management, engineering, research, supply chain, and investment branches. Outside of Google, she meets with customers, nonprofit organizations, partners, and policymakers. But first, sustainability efforts start with understanding the problem at hand, Bennett said. For example, Google had to spend time with the consumer-goods company Unilever to better understand all the steps it takes to source its palm oil. Then, it could provide solutions on how technology can help make that process more sustainable. Still, that can be difficult because talking about sustainability can be broad. So, Bennett said her team tries to narrow it down to the most impactful areas. "This is also one of the challenges of sustainability. When it's overly complex, it's hard for people to decide what to do first or what to try," Bennett said.To narrow down where to start, the Google sustainability team focuses on a few specific areas. Google prioritizes productivity, simple decision-making, what would be most impactful, and how long the project takes, according to Bennett."What we've learned over time is as enterprises and individuals, we try to simplify," Bennett said. "We've created systems that allow people to make decisions quickly."

Google sustainability lead explains how the company is building a greener cloud as environmental concerns become a key battleground against rivals Amazon and Microsoft

<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/innovation-leaders"></a><div type="image" title="Haroon Meer headshot" height="1440" width="1920" msid="92212121" hostid="261"></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Thinkst is the 33-person cybersecurity company behind <keyword id="14197012" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="canary" source="Orion">Canary</keyword>, an industry-standard developer tool.</li><li>CEO Haroon Meer tells Insider how the firm maintains its "product-first" focus.</li><li>The cybersecurity industry suffers from a complexity problem, Meer says.</li></ul>Canary, a cybersecurity tool for software developers, has emerged as something of a standard in the information-security industry, driving an <a href="https://blog.thinkst.com/2021/03/we-bootstrapped-to-11-million-in-arr.html">$11 million-a-year business</a>. <a href="https://canary.tools/">Thinkst</a> is the company behind this tool. Haroon Meer started Thinkst after his decades-long stint as a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-cybersecurity-penetration-testing-analyst-career-industry-change">penetration tester</a>, someone who simulates cyberattacks to point out vulnerabilities in their client's <keyword id="11903597" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="security" source="Orion">security</keyword> systems. The results he found were sobering: Companies would spend "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/survey-business-leaders-concerned-with-cybersecurity-2020-12">millions on security</a>, yet won't know they've been breached," he told Insider. Canary attracts over 3 million users to its free product and customers in the Fortune 500 to its paid product, the company says. That success is made more notable by the fact that Thinkst is a small company in an industry dominated by giants like Cisco and Microsoft. Based in South Africa, Thinkst is fully <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-bootstrap-startup-to-success-according-to-founders">bootstrapped</a>, meaning that it's never taken a dime of venture capital, even as <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/25/cybersecurity-vc-funding-surges-to-a-record-11-5b-in-2021/#:~:text=According%20to%20Momentum%20Cyber's%20latest,same%20period%20a%20year%20earlier.">VCs pumped billions into the cybersecurity industry in 2021</a>. The <keyword id="11897892" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="startup" source="Orion">startup</keyword> received a $130,000 of grant from the Open Technology Fund in 2013. When Insider <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/canary-developer-startup-takes-no-vc-money-2021-9">spoke</a> with Meer last year, he seemed to be a bit of an outlier, especially since VCs and startups alike were boasting high valuations and record amounts of funding. Now that tech is in a downturn, and companies are raising money at half or even one-third of their valuations, Meer said he refused to lose focus in what he described as a "product-first company." Meer, after decades as a penetration tester, saw how complexity ended up tripping software up. His solution was then to make a security system so simple anyone can implement it. "To be honest, I think we are the stupidest product out there," Meer said."We are super simple, and we work. In part, that's what security needs — you need building blocks that you can rely on." Canary allows a customer to set up its namesake "canaries" — software designed to send an alert when a specific cyberthreat is detected. Those canaries can sit on computer networks, servers, and routers indefinitely. When an attacker tries to break in, the canaries are immediately set off to notify customers.Meer said Canary was pretty rudimentary but that it became apparent early on in the product's existence that it would become Thinkst's flagship and most popular product. The company has grown from 25 to 33 employees, but its client base has more than doubled. Yet Meer said the firm's focused headcount and purpose drove its success."I can totally understand why so many people hate security software, like, it gets in your way. It doesn't really do the job. It leaves you confused," Meer said. "What we were and now are still conscious of is making sure that our product is practical and that anything the customer doesn't like can be switched off." The result, Meer said, is a company thriving on its own terms by focusing on building a single useful tool that does exactly what it says it will do, nothing more and nothing less."Especially last year, as our company grew, people — from clients to other security firms — were pressuring us to put out new stuff because new features and new products are how the industry measures growth," Meer said. "But it takes courage to not just push out new stuff for the sake of seeming like you are moving forward."

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