Fresh off a $18.3 million funding round, cybersecurity firm HYPR has a new Manhattan office — with a sweet view of the Empire State Building.
The new space will make room for 30 to 40 additions to the company’s existing 55-person team. HYPR also secured the right to first refusal on a few additional office spaces in the building to support its growing headcount.
The extra elbow room was much-needed, HYPR chief technology officer Bojan Simic told Built In.
“In the last office, we were in this situation where people would post in Slack like, ‘Hey, who’s working from home today, so I can have a seat?’ It was far from ideal.”
While the office is outfitted with videoconference rooms, whiteboard walls and a big communal kitchen, you won’t find any shuffleboards or ping pong tables. That’s because the work HYPR employees do is mission critical.
HYPR is a password-less security solution that uses public key cryptography, instead of “shared secrets” like passwords, to protect businesses from bad actors. Individuals tend to re-use passwords, which opens enterprises up to password-stuffing breaches, in which hackers steal password data from one platform and use automation to break into other sites or applications.
“Imagine this — 50,000 people at some large company who’s one of our customers show up to work at 9 a.m. and HYPR isn’t working right. And every single minute that ticks cost potentially millions of dollars in business,” Simic said. “We’re always letting people know that what you’re working on isn’t just important; it’s critical to an organization."
In that vein, the company is looking to build out its team of experienced engineers. New hires don’t have to be from the security space, Simic said, but they have to have the serious know-how required to hit the ground running.
“We really firmly believe the old Steve Jobs adage, like don’t hire people to tell them what to do, let them tell you what to do.”
HYPR is currently in the process of building a program to train junior engineers, so it can hire more fresh faces without feelings like it’s tossing them into the deep end, Simic said.
Notably, the company is also looking for a director of demand generation, who will work to market HYPR’s product to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises.
Despite the high stakes of HYPR’s work, they do recognize the importance of having fun once in a while, Simic added.
“We do have a game console. And when I say game console, I mean we have a Nintendo Game Cube that is 17 years old, and we only have one game on it. And we host tournaments.”
For the record: They also go as a team to Las Vegas every year for the hacker conference DEF CON.
Take a virtual walk-through of HYPR’s new 37th Street and 6th Avenue office below:
