Purpose-Built: The Story Behind Andesite

This origin story was first published on February 19, 2025.

During his decades with the Central Intelligence Agency, first as a paramilitary operations officer within the Special Activities Center (SAC) and ultimately as a senior executive, Brian Carbaugh had never considered the similarities between the CIA and a startup business — that is not until he met Grant Verstandig, Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Red Cell Partners.

“It was Grant who showed me that in startups, much like the CIA, you’re dealing with uncertainty and high-stakes decision-making, albeit with different consequences,” said Carbaugh, the former Director of the CIA’s SAC who led and oversaw the Agency’s worldwide paramilitary and special operations. “You’re also trying to create an environment where people want to be part of something special; where you have a vision that’s shared across the organization; where you create pathways for communication so that even those at the most junior level can see how their work is moving the needle; where you impart a sense of purpose to what you’re doing; and where you’re introducing cutting-edge products and technology that resonate with early adopters. That’s almost identical to what I was doing at the CIA.”

So, when Carbaugh retired from the Agency after a more-than-30-year career with the U.S. Marines and Intelligence Community and Verstandig invited him to join Red Cell, he set his sights on building what would eventually become Andesite AI. A cybersecurity company whose aim is to equip cyber analysts with the best tooling and technology to help them achieve a sustained advantage over threat actors, Andesite was publicly launched in April 2024 by Red Cell and General Catalyst with $15.25 million in initial funding. To date, the company has raised a total of $38.25 million in funding.

Co-founded by Carbaugh and Verstandig, Andesite was born out of Carbaugh’s myriad experiences with the US intelligence community where he witnessed the Herculean efforts undertaken by the CIA’s cyber operators as they defended the most targeted organizations in the world and the challenges that make their jobs extremely difficult, oftentimes contributing to analyst burnout. “Over the last 25 years, there has been a proliferation of cyber point solutions sold to organizations, each promising to make the jobs of their defense teams meaningfully easier. As a result, one of the main issues that cyber analysts face today is having to toggle from app to app to app to gather data. One analyst described it as this ‘hellscape’ of toggling and chair swiveling,” said Carbaugh. “They come to work every day awash with threat intel feeds, blinking lights, and very expensive solutions, all of which require them to spend an overwhelming majority of their time trying to navigate and make sense of it all.”

Andesite’s promise, Carbaugh explained, is to extract cyber defense teams from all that “noise” so they can focus on tasks that matter the most and make informed decisions at the edge, much faster. Through technology that combines the best of human capabilities with state-of-the-art tools, Andesite’s aim is to increase the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of human-driven security operations so analysts are in the driver’s seat and, ultimately, better-equipped to proactively detect potential threats so they can quickly remediate, and prevent cyberattacks. The Andesite  platform allows for seamless integration with existing enterprise environments, enabling decision-making across disparate sources of data, and has compliance baked in, ensuring every recommendation  is transparent, auditable, and can be compiled into comprehensive reports about respective investigations and outcomes.

While building the Andesite team, rather than hiring only cyber defense professionals, Carbaugh knew he wanted to gather a multidisciplinary group of domain experts whose actions are governed by the company’s mission and a high sense of humility. His first two hires were Alex Thaman, a former Chief Architect of Computer Vision at Unity and Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, and William MacMillan, a former Senior Vice President for Information Security at Salesforce and a former Chief Information Security Officer at the CIA, who were brought on as Andesite’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively. Since then, the team has grown to 40 employees skilled in cyber defense as well as artificial intelligence, computer vision, data science, and national security and all dedicated to delivering breakthrough technology that achieves real and meaningful results.

Of his decision to join Andesite, Macmillan, who has known Carbaugh since they were cadets in the U.S. Air Force Academy, explained, “Brian and I have been friends since we were 18-year-olds. I know what a great leader he is, so when he told me we’re going to build ground-breaking tech that’s going to help overworked, overwhelmed cyber security teams, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with him and contribute to the cybersecurity ecosystem. To be able to take the pain points that I, in my prior life, saw these teams go through and translate that through the product lens to deliver tools built by incredible technologists, I found that opportunity very compelling.”

Beyond equipping defense teams with powerful solutions, noted MacMillan, Andesite is working to remove cyber analysts from the menial tasks that consume much of their day and help them operate at a much higher level. “Analysts are some of the best and brightest we have and, yet, we put them in these environments where they use little of their time on truly meaningful intellectual pursuits. They live in a world where they have to use arcane querying languages where, if you misplace a comma or if you misspell something, the whole search fails. At Andesite, we remove individual analysts from that toil and provide them with technology that super-empowers them, making them better, stronger, and faster.”

Joining Carbaugh, Thaman, and MacMillan in Andesite’s C-suite are proven tech leaders who bring to Andesite a breadth of experience from both the public and private sectors, including Chief Strategy Officer Greg Rattray, PhD, former CISO at JP Morgan Chase; and Chief Revenue Officer Jaci Tomek, a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and go-to-market executive with leadership experience at companies like NetWitness (Dell) and iSight Partners (Google).

As a company that is working to free analysts from technical complexity, Carbaugh makes it clear that AI is an effective way to empower cyber analysts. “We’ve been asked, ‘Are you trying to replace the analyst?’ Far from it,” Carbaugh said. “We see ourselves as an AI-driven company that’s working to optimize human analysts and enable them to move at a faster speed, with greater scale, and to make clear, well-reasoned, fact-based decisions. Our goal is to unlock data, unleash teams, and transform outcomes so enterprises can gain an unfair advantage against those that seek to do them harm.”