IT-Harvest is a company that researches and reports on the cybersecurity industry, covering over 3,200 vendors. Pulse 2.0 interviewed IT-Harvest Chief Research Analyst Richard Stiennon to learn more about the company.
Richard Stiennon’s Background
What is Richard Stiennon’s background? Stiennon said:
“I studied aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. The next ten years I was a structural engineer in the automotive industry. In 1992 I founded one of the first ISPs in Michigan, RustNet. From there I joined a security startup called Netrex which went on to be acquired by ISS and ultimately formed the basis for IBMs managed security service. In the meantime I had gone on to PricewaterhouseCoopers as a manager of Technical Risk. In 2000 I was hired by Gartner as their second industry analyst covering security. I spent some time at Webroot Software before launching IT-Harvest, a data driven analyst firm. Along the way I have earned my MA in War in the Modern World from Kings College, London and written ten books on the analyst industry and cybersecurity. The most recent is Security Yearbook 2025: A History and Directory of the IT Security Industry (Wiley, May 2025).”
Formation Of IT-Harvest
How did the idea for the company come together? Stiennon shared:
“Before I joined Gartner, the only thing I new about them was their DataQuest product. At PwC we had a desktop dashboard running in Lotus Notes that had a constant stream of news and data on the booming tech industry. Gartner acquired DataQuest but when I joined, the service was hardly functional and eventually ended. When I founded IT-Harvest I wanted to build the DataQuest for Cybersecurity. It took 18 years but I believe we have accomplished this.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Stiennon reflected:
“Getting our first subscriber to the IT-Harvest Dashboard. They were a large private equity firm. They have renewed every year since they came onboard and are a valuable partner.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Stiennon explained:
“We have three products: the IT-Harvest Dashboard is the core product. It is the only platform for researching the 4,000+ vendors and 10,000+ cybersecurity products in the market. A subscriber can simply log in and filter a search query on country, size based on headcount, funding, growth, conferences sponsored, and alignment with NIST CSF, and MITRE ATT&CK. The product search feature allows you to quickly view all the products that match your keywords, like SIEM(184 products), HSM(40), or Vulnerability Management (585). There is also a news feed broken into channels for M&A, Funding, Legal, and Product News.”
Our second product is an API that subscribers use to query our database and get our data. Large enterprises use this to integrate with their existing supplier management solutions.
Our newest product is HarvestIQ, a set of AI assistants. The HarvestIQ Analyst Assistant is a chat interface to our data on 4,069 cybersecurity vendors. Investors and strategic M&A people use it to look for prospective portfolio companies or acquisitions.
The HarvestIQ Architect Assistant is a chat interface to our data on 11,349 products. Security experts and architects use it to explore product options when they have a new project.
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Stiennon and the team faced in building the company? Stiennon acknowledged:
“Our biggest challenge to date was the blowback from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Our ideal customer profile was investors in cybersecurity companies. The venture industry came to a screeching halt in early 2023. They stopped spending money.”
“The addition of product data to our platform has been magical. All of a sudden we have a killer product for security architects and project managers that need to find the best products for their environments. So our new ICP is much larger and they have immediate need.”
Evolution Of IT-Harvest’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Stiennon noted:
“The Dashboard launched March 30, 2022. Eight months later ChatGPT was released and we immediately started to use it. The first task was to take all of our curated data and write descriptions of the 3,200 companies we tracked. The following year one of our API customers requested product data. Collecting that and making it available uses multiple large language models that we swap out often based on current pricing and effectiveness. And now we have leveraged LLMs to provide intelligent agents.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Stiennon cited:
— First customer May 3, 2022
— Tenth customer October 3, 2022
— Hiring our VP sales June 2023
— Launch of the free RSAC 2024 App May 1, 2024
— Exhibiting in our booth at the Gartner Security and Risk Summit June 2024
—Launching HarvestIQ.ai on January 15, 2025
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Stiennon highlighted:
“One of our customers proposed a new use case: finding OEM partners. As soon as they were onboarded they researched and presented an itemized TAM to their board. They have been following up and selling to those companies ever since and continue to renew each year.”
Funding
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? Stiennon revealed:
“We are bootstrapped with $460K ARR. We expect to get to $3 million ARR in 18 months and will look at funding at that point.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Stiennon assessed:
“If you add the revenue of Gartner, Forrester, Omdia, S&P, plus all of the market data providers you get $50 billion. So the potential is there.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Stiennon affirmed:
“The most frequent comment we get is how valuable our categorization is. I personally categorize all the vendors, a task even ChatGPT cannot do(yet). The other differentiation is how fast we are moving. We add new data sets and features weekly. Nobody can keep up with us.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Stiennon concluded:
“We hope to establish an office in Europe because about half of our users are overseas. We need to hire about three people today for customer support and development.”
“We are poised to take advantage of the next generation of LLMs. We already know how we are going to use them!”
