Idea: A founder-matching and angel-investor platform for cyber security startups The problem. Cyber security…
Liam R. — Freelance Penetration Tester
Idea: A founder-matching and angel-investor platform for cyber security startups
The problem. Cyber security is one of the hardest sectors to assess talent in from the outside. A polished LinkedIn profile or a stack of certs tells you almost nothing about whether someone can actually find a vulnerability, write a clean exploit-mitigation, respond to an incident under pressure, or build something defensible. Co-founder matching and early-stage investment in this space therefore run on warm intros and reputation, which excludes a huge amount of genuine talent and lets a lot of noise through.
The insight (borrowed from the GitHub Launchpad proposal). In security, unlike most fields, real proof-of-work already exists in public and is hard to fake: published CVEs and the researcher credited on them, CTF rankings, bug-bounty track records (HackerOne/Bugcrowd reputation), open-source security tooling on GitHub, conference talks (DEF CON, BSides, Black Hat), and responsible-disclosure history. These are verifiable signals of capability, not claims. A platform that aggregates and structures them turns "trust me" into "look at the record."
What Cyberr could build.
Verified researcher/founder profiles — opt-in profiles that pull and corroborate public signals (CVE credits, bounty reputation, tool contributions, talk history) rather than self-reported skills.
Co-founder matching on real signals — pairing on complementary capability (offensive vs defensive, research vs product vs GTM), working style, and domain (cloud, OT/ICS, appsec, threat intel), inferred from actual work rather than keywords.
The micro-collaboration audition — matched candidates run a small scoped challenge together (a mock disclosure, a threat-model exercise, a short build) before any commitment. How people work under mild pressure reveals more than ten calls.
Structured venture proposals — a template for early security startups that doubles as a working document and an investor artifact, with an honest history of how the idea developed.
Angel/pre-seed portal — a curated feed of high-momentum early security projects ranked by genuine activity and credibility signals, not who the founders already know. Lets specialist cyber angels and funds watch promising teams form before a pitch deck exists.
Why Cyberr specifically. The community and trust layer is already here. Cyber security is a field where credibility is everything and where verifiable track record is unusually abundant and unusually hard to game. Owning the moment before a security company exists — the first commit, the first disclosure, the first co-founder conversation — is a structural position no generalist platform can replicate.
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Comments
Laurent H.: Very cool idea Liam Romanis
Liam R.: Laurent Halimi thanks Laurent. It is something no body is doing really, not even YCombinator