Detroit-based Judy Security, which serves the SMB space with an AI and machine learning-based solution, has done the same as Oracle and other companies before it and renamed the company after their core product, Judy. The company, which sells almost entirely through MSP and MSSP partners, offers seven separate solutions on their platform, in a world where most SMBs use point solutions for their security needs.

The company is a startup, founded in March 2019 by Raffaele Mautone, whose past senior positions includes roles at Duo Security, FireEye and McAfee. Unusually in the IT space, Judy is located in downtown Detroit, right off Woodward Avenue.

“The downtown has upgraded a lot in the last several years,” Mautone said. “The whole downtown ecosystem has changed, and we are a part of that.”

The original company name – AaDya Security – was a personal choice.

“A is the first initial of my daughters’ names, and D is for Detroit,” Mautone stated. Aadya is a middle eastern word but the pronounciation is different from what we wanted, so we named the company AID-AY-UH.”

The decision to rebrand reflected the face that customers and partners referred to the company as Judy.

“Judy was the product,” Mautone indicated. “She is the AI security team member, and customers spoke of her as a person. So we rebranded everything. It really wasn’t that far a stretch for us, because we had never led with AaDya Security.”

Mautone also emphasized that Judy is not a bot.

“She functions and learns like an InfoSec team member,” he said. “Her AI is the biggest piece of the solution. Harnessing these capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning has helped us. Judy is not Generative AI, where she writes answers for specific questions. Judy enables a small business by being that security team member, scanning blocking and remediating in real time.

“Each of the pillars of the solution are designed through the perspective of an SMB owner,” Mautone said.

Those seven pillars on the company’s platform are: Endpoint Detection and Response; DNS Filtering; Password Manager; Judy’s Blue Team Cloud SIEM + XDR; Automated Compliance Management and Reporting; Secure Authentication; and Security Awareness Training.

“These pillars provide enterprise-grade protection at a price point that SMBs can afford,” Mautone stated. “With SMBs, it often comes down to price.” Pricing for the suite of security features starts at just $14/month

Many of these products are not common at all in the SMB space.

“Since we tend to work with MSPs, typically we come up against point product vendors on deals,” Mautone said. “Many SMBs have not even heard of some of these things. They typically do have point solution passwords for end user security or password management. EDR, vulnerability scan, SIEM and some form of training we do see, but they are less common. We have not seen multi sign-on password managers at SMBs.”

More is on the way.

“Over the next six months Judy 4.0, based on feedback, will appear,” Mautone indicated. “There will be a new portal, and we will go further into EDR and DNS.”

Judy was a channel company out of the gate.

“I and my team come from channel companies, and the enablement of partners is in our DNA,” Mautone said. “97% of our business goes through MSPs and MSSPs. We only deal direct when a specific customer demands it. Today, we have 70 partners, and we intend to be at 130 by the end of the year. We are not, however, trying to boil the ocean for partners and see what sticks.”

Today, Judy has no Canadian partners, but they expect that to change.

“We have a couple of Canadian partners that we hope to close on in the next few months,” he said.