Maro, the cognitive security platform company created to empower security leaders to manage human risk proactively, announced today it successfully raised $4.3 million from Downing Capital Group. With the Maro platform now available, the company plans to use the seed round for team growth, product development, and executing its go-to-market strategy.
Maro empowers security leaders to take control of human risk and defend against human error and threats amplified by AI, including social engineering, insider risk, and ungoverned AI usage. Maro’s platform dynamically intervenes in the moment to prevent cognitive risks from becoming security or compliance incidents, providing security teams with instant visibility into their workforce’s behaviors and intentions.
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Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) cites breaches involving a human element at 60%. Maro reinforces secure behaviors in real-time, securing decision-making in the workflow with use-case-level policy enforcement.
“When stress levels are high and attackers use that opportunity to manipulate your workforce into taking risky actions, Maro protects how people think, decide, and act,” said Jesse Downing, CEO and portfolio manager at Downing Capital Group. “Maro’s founding team has deep cybersecurity experience solving human-focused problems, working together across three companies, including several with successful exits.”
Maro was founded in late 2024 by Jadon Montero, Gwen Betts, and Jen Andre, a repeat cybersecurity founder team with more than 40 years of combined experience building and scaling category-defining security companies.
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Jadon Montero, Maro’s CEO, has deep experience in designing and bringing innovative security solutions to market, including SOAR, EASM, and MDR. Montero also served as a former product leader at Bitdefender, Censys, Rapid7, Komand, and ThreatStack, and began his career studying cyberwarfare under the first United States Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Gwen Betts, CXO, led the global product design team at Rapid7, encompassing detection and response, vulnerability management, and cloud security. She is known for scaling human-centered product solutions in complex domains. Betts was also the founding design and GTM leader at Komand.
Jen Andre, CTO, is a repeat founder and technologist with extensive expertise in cybersecurity, including as founder of Komand (acquired by Rapid7) and Threat Stack (acquired by F5). Andre also served as the vice president of product at Greynoise and Rapid7, and built her early career at Symantec and Mandiant as a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst and product builder, respectively.
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“Maro was born from our years spent inside broken security workflows where SOC analysts didn’t have time to speak directly to every employee who urgently needed their help after legacy tools failed to stop the employee from taking a risky action,” said Montero. “The acceleration of generative AI, coupled with remote work and shadow software as a service (SaaS), exponentially increases the risk that users run afoul of company policy without even knowing it. With Maro, governance, risk, and compliance happen in the moment so that human risk is managed and mitigated – before issues even reach the SOC.”
Maro was developed with input from 50 CISO and CIO leaders in financial technology, healthcare technology, and retail. Overwhelmingly, these leaders identified AI usage governance as the most pressing human risk factor today, followed closely by targeted social engineering and insider risk. They emphasized that existing human risk tools generated excessive noise, lacked visibility at the usage level (where most knowledge work occurs: in the browser), and lacked enforceable policies responsive to both timing and behavioral context. As a result, security teams struggled to demonstrate ROI or drive measurable reductions in human risk.
