In June, Blackpoint Cyber secured a $190 million investment from Bain Capital and Accel. What will that investment go toward?

We wanted to make sure our ecosystem was hands down the best in the MSP space for security products. This money is going in a few core areas. We’re going continue to push the envelope on R&D. We have a unit called the Adversary Pursuit Group, which is our full-time threat intelligence rapid prototyping. Our whole strategy was to have a whole ecosystem of products that saves MSP spend, simplifies it so they get better margin and then we’re also heavily investing in partner enablement. We just launched Blackpoint University, which is starting with six courses. We’re really focusing on teaching MSPs great habits, pricing and packaging, structured selling and we have a whole leadership course taught by highly decorated former Special Operations officers. We’re really trying to do everything we can to work with our partners to level up everyone’s skills as they go to market and teach them how to sell security and how to get value out of security, even if they haven’t been hacked. Then obviously [we’re investing in] a massive go-to-market machine expansion, so our marketing and sales teams. There’s a big investment to push the pedal down.

What do you hear from partners in terms of their biggest challenges, and how is Blackpoint helping them?

The challenges I think have been the same. A lot of times challenges on the front end are lead generation on the business side. There’s challenges with how to have a security stack that makes insurers happy, that’s definitely a big one. The other thing is actually selling security. I think a lot of times we see MSPs try to upsell it and at the end of the day, whether you buy the security- plus package or whatever is being sold, if your customer gets ransomware they’re blaming you anyway. I think some of the pain is actually teaching them how to sell the value of the entire MSP offering with security baked in from the front. That helps post-sales customer success. When you upsell and then you do a QBR four months later, and maybe you haven’t been hacked, how do you show value? ...

And then vendor creep, having too many vendors, too many products that are hard to manage. Our whole strategy is we haven’t rraised prices since 2019 and we’ve added five products to the bundle. We’re going to continue that strategy to the point where our platform hopefully pays for itself. Security is very tricky, and it takes a huge amount of experience and a huge amount of investment.