Patient Capital: How Cleafy’s Organic Growth Strategy Paid Off in Cybersecurity
Most cybersecurity startups follow a familiar pattern: raise big, grow fast. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Cleafy CEO Matteo Bogana shared why they chose a different path.
After a small seed round, Cleafy grew organically for years. “What we have learned is that fundraising is an extremely consuming activity one side, and in order to raise money, you must be at the right time on the market maturity,” Matteo explains.
The decision proved strategic. When they launched in 2014, the market wasn’t ready for their solution. “The market was not actually there. We arrived quite early for the kind of technology that were developing,” Matteo notes. They spent two years landing their first customer.
Instead of raising large rounds to force growth, they focused on product development and automation. This patience preserved their freedom to evolve naturally. “If I would have collected plenty of investments at the very beginning, probably I would have failed, because the capability of the company to have market and very aggressive and the hypergrowth space at the beginning was not there.”
Their restraint enabled deeper product development. Rather than building a services-heavy business, they maintained “a very sharp focus on the product and automation and having everything in place in order to have the system doing things, avoiding to have people entering into the loop from our side to manage by hand.”
Today, as AI transforms both attack vectors and defense mechanisms, this foundation of automation positions them strongly. “More and more AI based attacks will rise,” Matteo predicts, but emphasizes human expertise remains crucial: “You cannot imagine that there’s going to be an automatic system capable to all the job on its own.”
The lesson? Sometimes the best way to build a sustainable company is to resist the pressure to scale prematurely. By growing organically and waiting for market maturity, Cleafy built stronger foundations for long-term success.