Malloc (YC S21) takes on mobile spyware
Threat model is the business model on this. Notable that the founders are women, and though it shouldn&#x27;t be remarkable at all, and perhaps it&#x27;s sexist to speculate they&#x27;re going to leverage that, but it&#x27;s a useful indicator because antistalker tech by&#x2F;for women is an influencer channel for other products. They&#x27;re a consumer app company and gender doesn&#x27;t matter to the tech itself, except from a product perspective, it&#x27;s really a potential advantage in this case.<p>The generic threat model for most security tools (which,  suck) has been the individual vs. the state or various generic criminals, whereas the threat actor in a mostly feminine threat model would be the much higher likelihood&#x2F;impact scenario of stalkers, who are as likely to be co-workers and IT admins as they are classmates, neighbours, or internet followers. Few want to even say this out loud because just verbalizing it is off-brand and comes with an ick factor. Hence no good products for it, yet. Stalkers get away with it because acknowledging them as part of your story at all elevates them to the level of peer or factor, and so the product discussion itself is often too gross to want to get into.<p>Solving for that is technically much more focused and useful from a secuirty perspective than say, taking on the universe of bad cops and spies. Plus, women are more likely to leverage recourse to law enforcement (instead of  physically beating a stalker), and so security tech that has to be designed to keep out a nation state to get security influencer adoption isn&#x27;t helping most of them.<p>Nobody in the security companies I worked for wanted to talk about these issues seriously because of the ick factor and a bunch of nerdy white knights diverting all uncomfortable  discussions to blockchains, but it&#x27;s also what creates the opportunity. This seems like a really smart play.