Guardare helps organizations identify and manage cybersecurity risks. Photo: Unsplash/ThisisEngineering.
Clearwater-based cybersecurity startup Guardare has completed an oversubscribed $5.6 million follow-on funding round to help expand its operations. The company raised $5.1 million in 2025.
An official announcement was made Monday.
Bothrounds were led by Utah-based early-stage venture firmAlbum VC,with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures and other organizations.
Guardare helps organizations identify and manage cybersecurity risks. The platform integrates with customers’ existing security tools to uncover exposures such asmisconfigurations and missing protections. It then provides teams with guidance to address these issues.
“We’re investing in people, sales, marketing and product,” said Guardare CEO and co-founder Lars Letonoff. “The focus is now to just scale quicker to get to Series A funding.”
Guardare CEO and co-founder Lars Letonoff. Photo provided.
Previously, Letonoff andGuardare founder and president Dane Fiori were executives at Clearwater-based KnowBe4, a provider of security awareness training. This experience ultimately led to Guardare’s development.
Fiori helped build out KnowBe4’s enterprise sales team. After engaging with a variety of customers, he recognized a key opportunity.
“You have these hundreds of thousands of organizations that rely on information technology staff to handle cybersecurity functions and they don’t necessarily know exactly what to do and in what order to do it,” Fiori explained. “IT and cybersecurity are completely different beasts. It’s a completely different language. So, my initial thought was ‘could we create an artificial intelligence that’s been trained to think like a cybersecurity person?’”
The goal, he added, was to create a simple “paint by numbers” experience that instructs IT team members on how to reduce risk within their companies.
“Over the last year and a half, what we’ve been finding is that enterprise or large organizations can use the product just as effectively,” Fiori said. “What it’s doing is breaking down silos between the IT and security teams, which are completely separate departments in your larger groups, and helping them work better together.”
Guardare founder and president Dane Fiori. Photo provided.
“When you have really complex cybersecurity environments with 20 or 30 different tools within the tech stack, you get a lot of chances of product misconfiguration,” he continued. For example, a company might purchase a software for its security operations but not continuously update the product as new versions are released.
Guardare’s platform mainly focuses on measures relating to people, devices and software.Letonoff said that the public betaversion of the product was introduced in March 2025. By July of the same year, the software became available commercially.
The founders argued that emerging technologies such as AI have key benefits.
“AI is just efficiency on steroids,” Letonoff explained. “That’s our market now. You see AI in everything. Every individual job in a company is using AI to some extent to be more efficient.”
The modern cybersecurity industry, he added, is very complicated. Companies have to manage the product ecosystem and ensure that they are following state and federal regulations. Letonoff called this “the perfect storm of complexity.” He believes that AI is essential in helping team members handle this “flow.”
