Cyber Swarm, based in Ploiesti, secured seed investment from Tim Draper through Draper Associates.
The team is ten or eleven people, mostly hardware engineers over fifty, and eighty percent of the budget goes into research.
The company set out to build a connected product, ran into hardware limits, and asked an engineer whether the whole thing could be miniaturised into a single processor incorporating deception technology. “The answer was yes,” Raneti says, “so the evolution was natural.”
Deception technology itself is three or four years old at this point: software that imitates other software, putting an attacker in the position of not being able to tell a real system from a false one.
Draper is founder-centric, Raneti says, bringing business ideas rather than technical direction and leaving the engineering alone. He calls it proactive help.