The Story of Calamu: Building a Future Where Ransomware Is Obsolete

The Story of Calamu: Building a Future Where Ransomware Is Obsolete

Sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected places. For Paul Lewis, the breakthrough that would lead to founding Calamu and creating an entirely new cybersecurity category didn’t come from a security conference or a whiteboard session. It came from watching his dog bury a bone.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Paul Lewis, CEO and Co-Founder of Calamu, shared the origin story of his data security company and his ambitious vision to make ransomware “just a thing of the past, part of our history and not something that we’re still talking about.”

The Breaking Point

The story of Calamu begins with frustration—the kind that builds over years of watching the same problems unfold again and again without real solutions.

“Prior to Kalamu, I was an incident response. I was a practitioner. I was working with multi global corporations that were just getting hammered in cyber attacks, like over and over again. And I thought there had to be a better way to do this and there had to be a better solution,” Paul recalls.

He started attending security conferences looking for answers. What he found instead was an industry stuck in repetition. “At the time, I was going to all the security conferences, and really, quite literally, I got tired of seeing like, 3000 companies selling the same ten things, and none of those things really were working. So I thought there had to be a better way. We have to think about how can we protect the data in a way that we’re not doing so today?”

This wasn’t a passing observation. Paul spent years thinking about the problem—”every waking moment for a couple of years”—trying to figure out a fundamentally different approach to data security.

The Moment of Inspiration

Then came the evening that changed everything.

“I was sitting on my porch literally one night, and my dog, my golden retriever, was sitting next to me. And he got up and he picked up his bone and he trotted across the street and he buried a hole in my neighbor’s yard and put his bone there and covered it up and came back, and I could swear he was smiling,” Paul remembers.

The insight hit him immediately. “And that was the moment of inspiration that I had that said, wow, he just put his most prized possession in the public domain, and he’s cool with it. He’s not worried about anybody accessing it. And that really was the change in mindset that I needed to start thinking about how can we put our data in the cloud, which really is the public domain in a way that makes it truly safe? And that was the beginning of Kalamu.”

The company name itself became a tribute to that moment. “My dog’s name was Kalamuchi, so Kalamu was his nickname, and I named the company after him.”

A History of Building and Selling

This wasn’t Paul’s first rodeo building technology companies. His entrepreneurial journey started in college.

“I started my first company when I was in college. It was called MC squared. It was a network monitoring company. And quite honestly, at the time, I didn’t know the difference between AR and AP, but learned the business real quick and got to learn that the world needed a way to understand how to monitor the health of a network and learned imposec as it was emerging,” Paul shares. “And that company was eventually acquired by a Fortune 500 company. So it was a pretty good ride.”

After that exit, Paul founded PG Lewis and Associates, “a data forensics incident response company, really one of the first companies in the space.” This is where he gained his frontline view of the cybersecurity crisis. “And here I really got a first hand look at the cyber problem, how bad it was and how bad it was getting. That company was also eventually acquired by a Fortune 500.”

These experiences shaped Paul’s philosophy: “I’ve always been interested in applying kind of disruptive technologies to fix an emerging problem. And now I’m leading Kalamu to make the cyber world a safer place for all.”

The Core Problem: Security Was an Afterthought

Paul’s years in cybersecurity revealed a fundamental flaw in how the digital world developed.

“I think one of the core problems that we’ve got, all of us, is that this whole cyber world started without security in mind, right? So it started all about ease of communication, and then we had to kind of interweave security after we realized we had security problems. So now the whole world is on cyber, and we have problems that are all throughout but creates opportunity all throughout.”

This insight drives Calamu’s approach. Rather than adding more layers to an already complex security stack, they’re protecting the data itself—addressing the root problem rather than patching symptoms.

Creating a New Category

Calamu isn’t just building a better security product. They’re defining an entirely new market category: cyber storage.

“We’re in a category called cyber storage. So it’s cybersecurity, but cyber storage is the way that we think about storing data in a way where we’re protecting the data itself. And it’s actually a new category. So Gartner recognizes this as a new category. Just recently, they recognize it as an emerging category,” Paul explains.

The differentiation is clear: “Instead of putting layered security on the infrastructure, and instead of trying to protect the network that holds the data, Calamu protects the data itself, regardless of what infrastructure happens to be on.”

This approach directly addresses what Paul sees as the real ransomware threat: “We have double extortion where data is actually stolen from the network and that data is then weaponized back against the company and used against the company and threatened to be released. And that’s really where we see the biggest growing kind of pain that we’ve got around ransomware.”

The Vision: A World Without Ransomware

Ask Paul about Calamu’s five-year vision, and he doesn’t hedge.

“Five year vision is today we do a great job of protecting data at rest in the cloud, and we have a vision of protecting all data. Right. So all data, whether it be transactional data in motion, any kind of data, we’ve got a big vision to do that. I’d love to see some of these cyber problems like ransomware completely eliminated, just a thing of the past, part of our history and not something that we’re still talking about. And, look, Kalama’s big vision is we want to make the cyber world a safer place for all. That’s really what we’re all about.”

It’s an audacious goal. When pressed on whether ransomware can truly be eliminated, Paul doubles down.

“I do. People think I’m crazy because the bad guys are always smarter, the mouse is always faster than the cat. But I think in this case, I could see a difference because we’re changing the battle surface. Right. We’re kind of changing the attack vector. And if we can eliminate that attack vector altogether, luck. I think there could be some ransomware extortion, or it’s always going to be bad guys for trying to get money out of companies, but they’re not going to do it by what we traditionally call ransomware. Today, that’s going to be gone.”

The Philosophy Behind the Approach

Central to Calamu’s strategy is a pragmatic acceptance of reality. “We start with the premise that the bad actor has reached the data. So there’s been a failure somewhere in the system and they’ve actually reached the data,” Paul explains. “So we’re trying to cut through the noise by putting out messaging that the attack has happened. And we need to be comfortable with the fact that attacks continue to happen even with great technologies and great emerging technologies to protect the data. Eventually the data is reached and when the data is reached, that’s where Kalamu kicks in.”

This isn’t defeatism—it’s realism combined with innovation. Rather than promising to prevent every breach (a promise the industry has failed to keep for decades), Calamu promises to protect what matters most: the data itself.

Building the Future

From a frustrated incident responder tired of watching companies get hammered by the same attacks, to a moment of clarity watching his dog bury a bone, to building a company that’s creating a new cybersecurity category—Paul’s journey with Calamu represents a fundamental shift in how we think about data protection.

The future Paul envisions isn’t just about better security. It’s about rendering an entire category of cyberattacks obsolete by changing the fundamental equation. When data is truly protected at the data layer, when it remains safe even in adversarial hands, the leverage that powers ransomware and data theft evaporates.

Whether that vision fully materializes or not, one thing is certain: Calamu is building toward a future where the question isn’t “how do we build bigger walls?” but “why do we need walls at all when our data is fundamentally unreadable to attackers?”

And it all started with a golden retriever named Kalamuchi, burying his bone across the street, completely unconcerned about who might find it.