Letter from the Founders: Rhombus Series C and our Growth Journey

Rhombus was started with a simple idea – we wanted to bring physical security to the modern era via the cloud and help make the world a little safer in the process.

Who would have guessed that 8 years after our first prototype camera – pictured below – we’d have a full suite of products spanning smart security cameras, access control, alarm monitoring, and IoT sensors deployed across more than 3,000 customers in partnership with 800+ resellers and 50+ technology partners?

Staying true to our vision from day 1 

The funny thing is that, aside from the exact numbers, this was the plan that we outlined from pretty much day one. The slide pictured below is from our first investor deck a few months after we founded the company.  

What’s interesting about this is that startups rarely go according to plan, but in this case, we have stayed very true to our early vision. We have had our fair share of audibles along the way, but in general, we knew what we wanted to build, why it was important, and how we wanted to go to market. 

Speaking of knowing how we wanted to go to market, a few slides before the one above, we laid out our plan of selling through the channel – working with security integrators, IT value-added resellers, and others – and we’ve stayed true to that vision as well. Reflecting on our days working at Sophos and seeing their incredible channel program in motion, we knew that this would be critical to our success. Like cyber-security and IT networking, our solutions necessitate trusted advisors to guide customers through installation, maintenance, and continual support. Without the channel, we knew we would not have a complete solution.  

Series C investment and our plans for growth 

While most of these letters hit the punch line right away (sorry, marketing 😊), we wanted to share some of our origin story before the big news, so if you’ve made it this far... 

We are thrilled to announce the latest milestone in our journey – a $45M Series C round led by NightDragon with new investor Bluestone Equity Partners and participation from Cota Capital, Tru Arrow Partners, Caden Capital, and Uncorrelated Ventures.  

NightDragon brings deep expertise in security products and selling through the channel. Given our cybersecurity history and the dynamics of the physical security market, these were incredibly important attributes when seeking a lead investor for this round.   

 So, what will we do with the additional resources? Aside from the standard comments of “investing it in R&D and more sales”, we will continue to invest in the vision outlined in that first investor deck. Specifically, we plan to invest in the following areas:  

• Advanced AI capabilities and additional products that help make our customers safer and smarter, all under a single pane of glass 
• Our incredible channel partners and tools that help them be all-stars to their customers
• Expansion of our international presence 
• Open and secure API infrastructure so developers and technology partners can leverage our platform to innovate and solve more unique challenges facing our customers  

Empowering customers with a truly open data platform 

On a final note, while we may have done a pretty good job in building a strong vision for Rhombus, it would be crazy for us to think that we have all the answers. Video and sensor data is simply far too rich with countless ways it can be used to help solve new challenges for our customers. And so, we plan to continue investing in a truly open data platform, giving both our customers and 3rd party developers the APIs and infrastructure they need to innovate alongside us.  

We are here to make a small dent in the universe and to do that, we are determined to build a company that will endure much longer than its founders. Don’t worry though, we’re not going away anytime soon, and we’ll make sure to leave some slides on where the company goes after us.