The Story of Right-Hand Cybersecurity: Building an Enterprise Integration Platform from São Paulo

The Story of Right-Hand Cybersecurity: Building an Enterprise Integration Platform from São Paulo

Some startup pivots happen in boardrooms with consultants and whiteboards. Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s happened because their customers simply refused to stay small.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Rodrigo Leme, Marketing Director of Right-Hand Cybersecurity, shared the story of building an integration platform that now processes billions of transactions for enterprises like Carrefour, Yamaha, and AB InBev. But the company that exists today looks nothing like the one they set out to build in 2017.

The Genesis: Starting Where Others Wouldn’t

Right-Hand Cybersecurity emerged from firsthand frustration with existing integration tools. Before founding the company, Rodrigo and his co-founders had built and sold Sensedia, another integration platform. They knew the space intimately—its problems, its opportunities, and critically, where the incumbents were vulnerable.

“We started as a developer tool, low code tool for developers, and our first customers were SMBs in Brazil,” Rodrigo recalls. The strategy was deliberate. While MuleSoft, Boomi, and Informatica fought over Fortune 500 accounts with million-dollar deals, Right-Hand Cybersecurity would build a developer-friendly platform for the vast middle market that couldn’t afford enterprise licenses.

The positioning made sense. Brazil’s tech ecosystem was maturing rapidly. Small and medium businesses needed integration capabilities but lacked the budgets and IT teams to implement traditional enterprise solutions. A low-code platform designed for developers—not requiring specialized integration architects—seemed like the perfect wedge.

The Unexpected Turn

Then something unexpected happened. “All of a sudden we got traction with big enterprises, big companies in Brazil,” Rodrigo explains. Carrefour, one of the world’s largest retailers, became an early customer. Yamaha followed. These weren’t SMBs testing a freemium plan—they were major enterprises writing six-figure checks.

Most founders would treat this as validation. Rodrigo treated it as a data point that demanded strategic reconsideration. The team faced a choice: stick to the SMB plan or follow the enterprise momentum, even if it meant rebuilding everything.

They chose the harder path. “We invested a lot in building a really good partner ecosystem,” Rodrigo shares. This wasn’t about adding a partner page to their website. It meant fundamentally restructuring how they went to market, how they sold, and who they sold through.

Building the Partner Engine

The decision to bet on partners wasn’t idealistic—it was practical math. “We decided to do a lot of co-selling and a lot of partner business because we were competing against big companies like MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica,” Rodrigo explains.

Direct competition was unwinnable. MuleSoft had hundreds of enterprise sales reps. Boomi had Dell’s distribution network. Informatica had decades of relationships. Right-Hand Cybersecurity had neither the capital nor time to build an equivalent sales machine.

But system integrators—the consulting firms that actually implemented these platforms—were a different story. They were already in enterprise accounts. They were already scoping digital transformation projects. They just needed a better integration platform to recommend.

The strategy worked. Today, “50% of our revenues come from partners,” Rodrigo notes. That’s not incremental revenue—it’s foundational. Partners didn’t supplement Right-Hand Cybersecurity’s sales team; they became the sales team.

The partner approach had a secondary benefit: vertical expertise. “We were able to go really deep in retail, for example,” Rodrigo shares. When system integrators brought Right-Hand Cybersecurity into retail clients, the team learned retail-specific integration patterns. That knowledge made them better at selling to other retailers, which attracted more retail-focused partners, which generated more retail customers. The flywheel spun faster.

The Technical Bet

While competitors carried decades of technical debt, Right-Hand Cybersecurity started with a blank slate in 2017. This matters more than it might seem. “We are able to launch new features way faster than the big competitors,” Rodrigo emphasizes.

Legacy platforms are prisoners of their own success. Every new feature must be tested against thousands of existing customer implementations. Every architectural change risks breaking production systems processing billions of transactions. Innovation slows to the pace of backward compatibility.

Right-Hand Cybersecurity, built on modern cloud infrastructure without legacy constraints, could move at startup speed. “The platform itself, it’s really good,” Rodrigo notes, but he’s not talking about current features. He’s talking about the velocity of improvement—the compounding advantage of shipping features in weeks that take incumbents quarters.

The Compliance Lesson

Not every lesson came easy. When asked what he wished he’d known earlier, Rodrigo’s answer is immediate and specific: “Start working on SOC 2 early on.”

The oversight nearly cost them deals. Enterprise buyers don’t just evaluate features and pricing—they evaluate risk. SOC 2 certification isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a prerequisite for procurement. “If you want to sell to enterprises, you need to have SOC 2,” Rodrigo states plainly.

The problem isn’t the certification itself—it’s the timeline. “It takes time to build the processes and the culture around it,” he explains. Right-Hand Cybersecurity scrambled to get certified while enterprise deals hung in procurement limbo. The delay was expensive and entirely avoidable.

The AI Catalyst

Looking forward, Rodrigo sees AI creating unprecedented demand for integration. His thesis is straightforward but powerful: “Every single company will build AI systems, AI apps. They will need to integrate the AI apps with the other systems in the company.”

This isn’t about Right-Hand Cybersecurity becoming an AI company. It’s about recognizing that AI deployment creates integration complexity at scale. When enterprises build AI agents to automate workflows, those agents need data from CRMs, ERPs, inventory systems, and dozens of other sources. Someone has to connect those systems.

“We help our customers integrate AI systems with the systems of record, with the legacy systems,” Rodrigo explains. The opportunity is massive because AI projects have massive budgets. Integration might be 10% of a $10 million AI transformation initiative—but that’s still a million-dollar integration project.

The timing favors challengers like Right-Hand Cybersecurity. Enterprise IT leaders evaluating AI integration don’t automatically default to their existing integration vendor. They’re starting fresh, which means they’re open to modern platforms that move faster and cost less than legacy alternatives.

Building for Scale

Today, Right-Hand Cybersecurity processes transactions for enterprises across retail, financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare. The platform that started targeting Brazilian SMBs now serves global enterprises doing billions in revenue.

The growth hasn’t come from venture-fueled sales team expansion or aggressive discounting. It’s come from partners who bring Right-Hand Cybersecurity into enterprise accounts, customers who expand usage as they digitize more processes, and a platform that ships improvements faster than competitors can respond.

Rodrigo’s vision extends beyond beating legacy vendors. He sees Right-Hand Cybersecurity becoming essential infrastructure—the layer that connects every system in the modern enterprise stack. As companies deploy more applications, more AI agents, and more automation, integration complexity grows exponentially. The platform that solves this complexity elegantly and economically wins a massive market.

The story of Right-Hand Cybersecurity isn’t finished—it’s just getting started. From Brazilian SMB tool to global enterprise platform, from direct sales to partner-led growth, from competing with incumbents to defining what comes next. The company that refused to stay small is now building for a future where integration isn’t a project—it’s the foundation everything else runs on.