I must say I was pleasantly shocked last week to receive an email from Madeline Lawrence, who grew up in Chestnut Hill, attended Springside School, and currently is the chief growth officer and co-founder of Aikido Security, one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity firms.

Aikido has been raising money at a billion-dollar clip. Numerous online sources say the company has achieved the “unicorn status” of a privately held startup company that has reached a valuation of $1 billion or more.

My first question was an obvious one: Why contact a community weekly newspaper like the Chestnut Hill Local for an article about a billion-dollar cybersecurity firm as opposed, say, to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Forbes or Fortune magazines?

“It’s because I grew up in Chestnut Hill and still feel a connection to it because I loved growing up there,” said Lawrence, who currently lives in Belgium. “People I grew up with might read about this. I still visit my parents. I used to always read the Local, especially the crime report. It was interesting to read about a bottle of wine stolen in the state store valued at $15 or something stolen out of a car. Where I live now in Ghent, a crime would be if somebody stole a sheep.”

Lawrence, 29, is a senior executive responsible for the company’s commercial strategy, financial health and overall business growth. Aikido Security, founded in Ghent, builds security products with a vision for “self-securing software.” Its central platform secures code and helps teams reduce risk of hacking into their computer systems. According to online business sources, it is trusted by more than 100,000 teams worldwide.

Long before her ascent in cybersecurity, Lawrence was still in school and her mom was retiring when their family of five moved to Barcelona, Spain. They lived there for seven years.

“We wanted a city that had warm weather, where we knew the language, was near water and had an international airport,” Lawrence said. “We narrowed it down to Barcelona, Lisbon and Marseilles and then picked Barcelona. Since then, Barcelona has gentrified. We moved and then spent six years in Amsterdam. I studied law there and minored in economics, politics and psychology. Then I started my first company.

“I soon realized I did not want to be a lawyer,” she continued. “So I applied to a technology company and said I’ll take any position. The first week I said to myself, ‘What am I doing?’ This company helped software companies grow. I told the boss he was not using my full potential. He said, we are going to become a venture capital firm. That was the start of everything. We successfully raised over $100 million, and I thought, ‘Why don’t I do this myself?’ So I did.”

After founding a micro fund fresh out of law school, Lawrence spent several years rising through the ranks of European venture capital, a sector of investment firms that provides financing for early-stage startups, similar to Silicon Valley. Lawrence eventually became the youngest partner in Europe at a $150 million venture capital fund, Peak.

In 2023, Lawrence met her future co-founder of Aikido, who pitched the idea, then called Doomsday but later changed to Aikido. “We are the only unicorn in Europe after three years in business and one of the fastest growing cybersecurity firms in the world,” said Lawrence, who lived in Berlin for five years, after Amsterdam and before moving to Belgium. She also lives part of the time in San Francisco, the high-tech capital of the United States.

“We need to be global players,” Lawrence said. “We have offices in London, Chicago, Romania, Armenia and Singapore. We have a lot more to build. Cybersecurity is seen as a niche topic. We do banking education. All software. We monitor [artificial intelligence], identify details, thwart hacker groups. Clients are big banks, insurance companies, UK governments, SoundCloud, the NFL, streaming sites, traditional corporations, now even smaller companies. Even if you are a small company, a restaurant, for example, you still have financial data that is at risk. AI has changed everything.

“It is profitable for the hacker to hack into a small company at no cost. It is everybody’s problem,” Lawrence continued. “Deep-fake attacks will become more sophisticated. I also want to protect the consumer. Everybody knows someone who has been hacked. Your entire life savings can be gone in an instant. There are awareness videos for the mass market. The hackers attack vulnerable people. They even scan obituaries, e.g., widows in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and tell them there is a sense of urgency, that they must send money right away. Remember that if it sounds wrong, it probably is. Not unusual to receive many spam calls in a day. My next company will solve this problem.”

Lawrence’s brothers, Teddy, a Chestnut Hill Academy alumnus, and Jamie, a Germantown Friends School grad, live in Berlin. “One is an artist, and the other is a drummer,” Lawrence said. “My parents, James and Beth, are back living in Chestnut Hill, but they travel a lot also.

“Chestnut Hill is beautiful, but I don’t see myself as living permanently in the U.S. I love southern Europe too much, and I am half Italian,” she said. “This continent was unlocked for me at age 18, but I grew up in one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

For more information, visit aikido.dev. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.