A Better Solution for Cybersecurity

From the energy sector to healthcare, just about every industry is vulnerable to cyberattacks, especially when vital equipment isn’t well protected. Cybercriminals can take down entire power grids, leaving communities in the dark for days. They might target hospital medication pumps that have outdated software, shutting off patients’ access to lifesaving drugs.

To help protect this type of long-lasting critical infrastructure, Katy Ganguli, ’12, and John Taplett, ’12, knew that organizations needed comprehensive, reliable data to understand and secure the internal hardware that makes it run. Industry experts told them the data they needed was impossible to find, but the former military intelligence officers were unconvinced.

“In the military, if somebody tells you to go do something and it’s hard, you can’t tell them you’re not going to,” says Taplett, a former intelligence officer in the US Navy who spent time working in the Middle East. “You just go do it. You do it. And you die trying—or you find a way to adapt and overcome.”

Taplett is now CEO of Ceritas, an enterprise hardware intelligence software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that helps organizations secure their hardware down to the component level. Ganguli is the company’s COO. She previously worked in US Army military intelligence in both the United States and Iraq. The two launched the startup after they met in Booth’s Full-Time MBA Program.

In school, as veterans new to the business world, Ganguli and Taplett bonded as they navigated unfamiliar concepts in their accounting and statistics courses. They joined the Armed Forces Group, Booth’s veterans network, where they found community with fellow veterans as well as mentorship, networking opportunities, and career counseling.

“It’s that camaraderie of having people in the same spot as you are,” says Ganguli, who was still in the National Guard when she started her MBA.

Taplett adds, “Of the friendships I’ve made at Booth, the ones that are the most enduring have been the veterans because we have a commonality.”

Incubating the Startup

After graduation, the two kept in touch while Taplett pursued investment banking in mergers and acquisitions and Ganguli worked in product management at American Express OPEN, the small business branch of AmEx. “But I really wanted to do something entrepreneurial,” she says. “I wanted to build something from the ground up.”

After a few years, they both ended up at Colvin Run Networks, a Tysons, Virginia-based company founded by fellow Booth graduate Nikhil Shenoy, ’12, that uses artificial intelligence to help organizations simplify and mine their complex data to improve decision-making. Ganguli became chief product officer and Taplett, COO.

Two years ago, the trio was working for the US Department of Defense on a security project for microelectronics—tiny devices such as the microchips in computers and cell phones. It got Ganguli and Taplett thinking about hardware security—or lack thereof—on a broader scale, across equipment and industries.

In summer 2021, at a Colvin Run retreat Taplett hosted in his front yard, they sketched ideas on a giant easel for how to better protect hardware from cyberattacks. “Katy and I described the solution we came up with to Colvin Run’s engineering team, and it was literally like we were talking in one voice,” Taplett says.

Their idea was to create a digital platform to help companies understand what’s inside their large-scale, expensive equipment—which often has a life cycle of two decades or more, increasing the likelihood of infection—see the risks, and act quickly to mitigate them. It was so-called “white space” in the industry, Ganguli says, an area in which a solution was critically needed.

Colvin Run became the incubator for the data platform now known as Ceritas. “That day was really the start,” Ganguli says. “Then we began prototyping.”

Securing the Data

Ganguli and Taplett decided to initially focus on the energy sector, where Taplett had extensive connections from his past work. First, they had to find and gather data on hardware pieces such as the microchips and processors that make up power plant equipment. They knew the data was out there somewhere and they began to gather it from a variety of public sources, including documentation that companies have on file with state governments, such as bills of materials—a list of components and instructions used to manufacture a product.  

“When you talk about critical infrastructure, it’s a real national security problem,” Taplett says. “It’s really hard to solve, which is why nobody had done it. As former intelligence officers, Katy and I knew how to go out and find the data we needed.”

Then they built out their platform. “It was a scrappy, grassroots approach,” Ganguli says. They closed on their first round of funding in December 2022, finding support from the Booth community. An early investor was former classmate Julia Taxin, ’12, general partner of Grotech Ventures, a private equity and venture capital firm in Owings Mills, Maryland, that invests in high-potential technology companies.

“We invested in Ceritas’s seed round and were a catalyst in bringing the investor group and Seed round together,” Taxin says. “The Booth network is a strong one, and I’ve been fortunate that my work intertwines so much with many of my classmates’ endeavors.” 

Ceritas’s hardware intelligence data platform analyzes customers’ equipment, maps out what they have, and detects risks in real time such as flawed components, product obsolescence, blacklisted manufacturers, product recalls, and security vulnerabilities. Once customers know they have a problem, they can devise a solution to secure their hardware, including network segmentation, applying needed patches, or purchasing different equipment all together.

Taplett and Ganguli now work with manufacturers to transfer data in a secure, scalable way directly to equipment owners along with a risk analysis so customers have exactly what they need to understand, prioritize, and mitigate hardware risks.

In addition to the Booth network, the Booth academic experience was integral to starting Ceritas, say Taplett and Ganguli. Taplett often references his Booth textbooks on taxes and business strategy that he keeps on a bookshelf in his home office.

“A lot of entrepreneurs run into problems with the finance aspect, but Booth really prepares you to do the finances of your own company,” he says. “We learned the things that we needed to be successful. I use my education all the time. It’s applicable day one.”

Taplett and Ganguli hope to complete a Series A funding in the next 18 months. It will help them accelerate their expansion into healthcare and expand into other new sectors where their platform is critically needed, such as banking. In making organizations more secure, they’re confident they’re helping to protect their country in a new way.

“Katy and I often say we still wear the flag on our shoulder,” says Taplett. “There are currently significant national security issues in the United States, and if we can be part of that solution, we want to be.”