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BrightPoint Security: Automating Trust for the Enterprise

Author

Jace Benson
May 12, 2025

This is part of a series I'm writing to help remind myself (and anyone else building) that it's possible. These aren't just stories about companies ServiceNow bought. They're reminders that someone out there built something worth acquiring.

The Origin of BrightPoint Security

BrightPoint Security started out in the early 2010s under the name Vorstack. Back then, enterprise security teams were buried in threat data, and “sharing” usually meant either oversharing or not sharing at all. BrightPoint showed up with a smarter idea: help organizations securely share and act on threat intel, without giving up control.

By 2016, they had sharpened their message and positioned themselves as a real player in threat intelligence:

“BrightPoint Security delivers actionable threat intelligence by reducing the noise inherent in threat data and enabling secure and controlled information sharing. The automated curation and correlation of threat data from external sources, behind your perimeter defenses, and behind the defenses of trusted organizations enables you to identify relevant threats in minutes instead of months.”

That’s not just filtering spammy alerts, that’s reducing months of work into minutes.

The Team Behind the Vision

These folks weren’t just punching above their weight—they knew what they were doing:

Andreas Haugsnes – Co-founder and technical lead. Started in engineering, worked in security at Zynga and LiveOps, and kept going post-BrightPoint at Unity. The guy knows his way around real-time threat systems.

Joe Eandi – Co-founder, initial CEO. Law background. Worked in early exec roles at Mojam and Inktomi. He helped get BrightPoint off the ground and into acquisition territory. Went on to co-found Cyber Mentor Fund.

Ravi Iyer – SVP of Products. Led product across big names like Sun, Nokia, and Good Tech. Post-BrightPoint, he landed exec roles at Splunk, Ivanti, Cybereason, and Veracode.

Scott Lewis – VP of Product. Assisted in the development of the product roadmap, joined ServiceNow after the acquisition and was responsible for the re-platforming into ServiceNow.

Rich Reybok – CTO at the time of the acquisition. Came from Redzone Security, Merrill Lynch, and Asurion. He joined ServiceNow after the acquisition and now runs software engineering there.

Anne Bonaparte – Took over as CEO during BrightPoint’s growth stage. Had already been CEO of a few successful exits: MailFrontier, Tablus, Solidcore, Xora. She's a go-to operator for getting companies across the finish line. I was so amazed by Anne’s history I spent all week thinking about it.

3. What BrightPoint Built

Their product was called Sentinel. It let organizations automate how they shared and correlated threat intel, internally and externally. It wasn’t just pulling in feeds and calling it a day. It was about real-time collaboration with trust boundaries in place.

This meant faster detection, stronger signals, and fewer blind spots. It gave teams the ability to share what mattered and act on it with context.

It looked more like a trust network than a feed parser. That was the difference.

The Acquisition by ServiceNow

ServiceNow picked up BrightPoint in an all-cash deal around May 2016. The price wasn’t disclosed, but it came just a month after they acquired ITapp. This was during a time when ServiceNow was just getting serious about security operations.

The deal gave ServiceNow instant credibility in threat intel automation. BrightPoint’s tooling slotted in to help accelerate the Security Operations suite, especially around detection and response.

They also had connections with RSA and IBM, and had raised around $8.4M. That kind of backing made it clear this wasn’t a fluke.

Where It Stands Today

You won’t find the BrightPoint name anywhere now, but its DNA is all over ServiceNow’s security products. The core tech lives on in Security Incident Response and Threat Intelligence.

These apps help teams triage faster, connect data points, and automate what used to take hours or days. BrightPoint brought the “intel” into what used to be just a ticketing workflow.

Lessons & Takeaways

Noise Reduction = Value
BrightPoint didn’t invent threat intel. They just made it actually useful. They cut through the noise, and that made all the difference.

Security Doesn’t Have to Be a Solo Sport
They built tools for collaboration. Shared defense. That was rare at the time, and it stood out.

An Exit Isn’t the End
Getting acquired wasn’t the finish line. It gave BrightPoint’s team a bigger platform, and gave ServiceNow a boost into a new product area.

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