Plurilock Security is rewarding investors while offering strong AI-driven protection against cyber threats

Cyber attacks are increasingly plaguing governments, businesses, and individuals globally, so much so that worldwide spending on cybersecurity products and services will exceed US$1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.  

Canadian cybersecurity company Plurilock Security Inc is carving out its own lucrative niche in this trillion-dollar industry by providing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and true continuous authentication using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven behavioral biometrics to confirm a user’s identity. All of which has rewarded Plurilock investors with a more than 138% stock-price appreciation over the past year, based on the company’s current share price of $0.62. 

Plurilock CEO Ian Paterson is a 10-year data analytics entrepreneur with a proven track record in commercializing data science solutions and landing multi-million dollar accounts. Here, Paterson tells Proactive exclusively how Plurilock intends to grow its business, both through acquisitions as well as organically through cross-selling. 

Proactive: What sets Plurilock Security apart from other publicly traded cybersecurity companies?  

Ian Paterson: Plurilock differentiates itself in several ways. As a start, few companies in the cybersecurity space are publicly traded, and those that are generally are much larger enterprises; think Okta, Fortinet, and Symantec. These companies are multi-billion-dollar enterprises that have large institutional followings. Plurilock offers one of the few ground-floor opportunities for investor exposure in a market poised to reach $1 trillion from 2020-2025.   

Another differentiator is while many of our competitors operate in a number of areas within the cybersecurity landscape, our Technology Division has niched down within the identity-centric segment of the market. We provide sophisticated continuous authentication technology to mid-to-large enterprises that are concerned with the growing cyber threat and how to secure employee devices. 

On a more technical level, our continuous authentication solution uses micro-patterns in a person’s keystroke or pointer behaviour for identification, every 3-5 seconds, whereas most identity-centric cybersecurity companies offer multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a means of authentication, which is the current standard of the industry. 

Lastly, we’re proud to have built a great board and management team with extensive backgrounds in deep tech, machine learning, enterprise SaaS, and mostly importantly, successful exits in the cybersecurity industry.   

Plurilock has been awarded several new contracts over the past few months. Do you have a revenue target for the year and how do you plan to grow sales?   

Since April 2021, we have announced over US$10 million in sales from all announced contracts and orders. Our Solutions Division will continue its ongoing efforts to secure new contracts and orders from various federal and state agencies in the US on the federal, state, and local levels, by leveraging established sales channels, master service agreements, and longstanding business relationships.   

Concurrently, we continue to expand our direct sales team and sign new reseller agreements to distribute Plurilock’s high-margin products for our Technology Division. We plan to capitalize on our Solutions Division’s vast distribution channels to cross-sell those high-margin products. We also intend to advance our M&A strategy and look to acquire more companies that offer synergistic opportunities to accelerate our sales growth.    

Plurilock has been described as an acquisition-oriented company. What kind of businesses do you hope to acquire over the next two years and which qualities do these companies need to possess?   

We have an active pipeline of acquisition targets consisting of cybersecurity services firms, ancillary service providers, and technology companies. These businesses, when added to our platform, present an opportunity to expand our technology infrastructure, leverage additional sales channels to cross-sell our high-margin products, and expand our market presence across North America and potentially internationally, as we grow our client base.  

How will you pay for these acquisitions? Debt? Equity?   

Each acquisition is different. We will utilize a combination of cash-on-hand, equity, and debt to determine where we see the lowest cost of capital and the highest ROI (Return on Investment) for our shareholders.   

Finally, what do your shareholders have to look forward to in the next 12 months?   

Our focus as a fast-growing cybersecurity technology company is expansion. We are proud that organizations like the Naval Surface Warfare Center, US Air Force, the US Department of Defense, US Special Operations Command, the Department of Homeland Security, and the US Department of the Navy trust us to deliver solutions to them. 

We are seeing a lot of companies that could potentially serve as great bolt-on candidates to our existing portfolio. These could be additional distribution arms like Aurora, professional services firms, and technology providers that have complementary cybersecurity products that would expand our offerings. The cybersecurity industry is gaining traction globally, with several high-profile breaches making headlines, and with more companies of all sizes dealing with security issues due to the growing cyber threat.   

We have seen large enterprises succumb to ransomware attacks, all the way to small companies dealing with employee theft because of a weak organizational cybersecurity infrastructure. We firmly believe that cybersecurity will remain at the forefront of every executive’s mind as we head into a post-pandemic world and beyond. 

Contact Sean at [email protected]

Story by ProactiveInvestors