The Story of Monad: Building a Platform for Good in Cybersecurity’s Data Revolution

The Story of Monad: Building a Platform for Good in Cybersecurity’s Data Revolution

Some founders start companies because they see a market opportunity. Others start because they can’t unsee a problem. Christian Almenar, CEO and Founder of Monad, falls into the latter category—and the realization that sparked his company came from an almost painful observation at his previous startup.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Christian shared the journey of building Monad, a security data platform that’s raised $19 million in funding. It’s a story that spans six countries, a VMware acquisition, a pandemic pivot, and a mission to fundamentally upgrade how the cybersecurity industry handles data.

A Global Foundation

Christian’s path to founding Monad was anything but linear. Growing up in Spain and attending German school, he developed an early fascination with computers and cybersecurity—the kind that occasionally got him “a little bit in trouble with computers in high school.”

This wasn’t idle teenage mischief. It was the beginning of a pattern that would define his career: “Always was very into cybersecurity since a kid,” Christian explains. That passion drove him to immigrate to America for college, studying Western engineering before bouncing between New York, Boston, and eventually a cybersecurity firm in Switzerland.

The international experience continued with a summer working at a company in Beijing before Christian landed in Silicon Valley in 2013. “I grew up in a pretty big family, too. We were like six brothers and sisters. Originally in Spain, but then also in Germany and was spending a lot of time in England and France as well,” he notes. Living in six countries before founding Monad gave Christian a global perspective on cybersecurity challenges.

The Intrinsic Experience

Before Monad, Christian built and sold Intrinsic to VMware. The acquisition marked his first experience inside a large company, and the contrast was striking. “It was the first time working at a big company, to be honest, so I learned a lot about the internals of the big company,” Christian says.

But the lessons weren’t just about corporate politics or enterprise sales cycles. At VMware, Christian was building a business unit in cybersecurity and thinking about the industry from a bigger scope. That broader view revealed something troubling about how the industry operated.

“I love startups. I mean, it’s really the only thing I know what to do, to be honest. I don’t know. I love the thrill of it,” Christian admits. When COVID hit and the opportunity arose to start something new, he jumped at the chance. But this time, he was armed with a specific insight from his Intrinsic experience.

The Painful Realization

The inspiration for Monad came from recognizing an uncomfortable truth about cybersecurity’s relationship with data. Christian observed that the tech industry had become remarkably sophisticated at using data in some domains while completely failing to apply those same techniques to security.

“As a tech industry, we’ve done amazing work at understanding who’s on the other side of the screen in order to show them ads, really targeted ads, we really understand who’s on the other side and able to sell them a lot of really awesome things,” Christian explains. Companies had mastered product analytics, HR data, and sales data using advanced data technologies.

Meanwhile, in cybersecurity: “What we kept running into is that customers really what they really struggle is like they have too many security products. They can’t really handle all the data these tools generate, yet they can’t really act on the data they generate easily the same way they act on when they get a lot of sales data or product data.”

The gap was striking. “It was almost striking that cybersecurity being so critical and so important for the world that it’s not Alipar with other industries,” Christian says. The question became clear: “How can we uplift the industry to at least be Alipar with what people do for sales data or marketing data?”

Building Something Different

This realization shaped everything about how Monad would be built. Rather than creating another security tool to add to an already crowded market, Christian decided to solve the underlying infrastructure problem.

“We don’t try to replace really any particular security tool out there. We want to empower customers to really take the most value out of the tools they currently have, be able to act on the data that those tools generate, and load it in whatever data warehouse they have, and then allow them to do more data driven workflows with them,” Christian explains.

The positioning was deliberate: help customers “consolidate it, and ultimately be more effective in solving, understanding the risk and solving the threats they may have through just allowing them to do more data driven work.”

This approach required a different kind of company. “We’re not a traditional security company per se. We’re more like a data kind of infrastructure company. This just happens to be very focused in cybersecurity,” Christian notes.

The Sequoia Incubation

Rather than rushing to market, Christian took a more measured approach: “We started really incubating this company with Sequoia. In the beginning, we saw the success of the warehousing movement, south lakes of the world.”

The incubation model allowed Monad to work with design customers from day one, ensuring they built something truly valuable. It also provided credibility with early Fortune 500 customers who might otherwise be skeptical of a pandemic-era startup.

But Christian never lost sight of making the product accessible beyond just large enterprises. “We want the product to look the way we’re designing it, even like how it looks. It looks more like a segment or a stripe and less than a typical security product,” he says. The team launched a private beta of a self-serve version, experimenting with “smaller communities but starting to get more bottoms up adoption.”

Mission Over Metrics

What makes Monad’s story distinctive is how Christian frames the company’s purpose. This isn’t just about building a successful business—it’s about upgrading an entire industry’s capabilities at a critical moment.

“We really like trying to build a company that does as best as possible because as we see more and more, this cybersecurity is more like such a critical piece and maintaining civil liberties and the privacy online and enjoying all the fun things that we do on the Internet,” Christian explains.

The mission attracts specific talent: “People in the company that came from companies like Palantir, for example. So we’re very kind of mission driven, very values driven, and we want to just be an agent of good for the world.”

This isn’t feel-good corporate speak—it’s a deliberate strategy for building the kind of company Christian wants to lead. “We’re really doing it. We’re focusing a lot on having fun doing it and trying to attract the best talent possible,” he says.

The Future Vision

Christian’s ambitions for Monad extend far beyond current customer segments. When asked about the five-year vision, he paints a picture of scale with purpose: “Hopefully five years will be like that, just larger, with a lot of amazing talented people, great customers working not just with big customers, but also governments and smaller companies. That will be my dream. It would be super fun.”

The vision is rooted in recognition that cybersecurity challenges are accelerating: “As we see, there’s a lot of black swan events happening in cybersecurity that people need to adapt to.” Monad’s role is to provide the data infrastructure that enables faster, more effective adaptation.

“We set ourselves to build like a long standing company. Of course we want a company with the public and be very profitable, but we wanted to be a platform for good,” Christian says. “Be able to attract the most talented people we can to get people to empower them to do the best job possible when solving, understanding the risks, understand be able to defend themselves against new threats that are coming in the future.”

It’s an ambitious vision—uplifting an entire industry’s data capabilities while building a profitable, enduring business. But for someone who’s lived in six countries, sold a company to VMware, and can’t help but see what cybersecurity could be, it might be exactly the right level of ambition.

The question isn’t whether cybersecurity will eventually match other industries in data sophistication. It’s whether companies like Monad can accelerate that transformation before the next black swan event makes the gap even more costly.