Founder Spotlight: Gus Lersten

Gus Lersten and Luke Wattam are the Co-Founders of Labrys, a London based start-up that has created Axiom C2, a revolutionary Global Team Management & Human Intelligence platform which enables the integration of secure communications, payments, and visibility of communities across the globe.  

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How did you get interested in your sector initially?

Primarily through my personal background as a soldier in the Royal Marines, and later as a government contractor into some policy implementation successes and failures. Interestingly, the fundamentals of Command, Control, Communications and Coordination Software applications ultimately originated with early Real-Time Strategy icon-based computer games of the early 2000's where you could shape the world as a single player using a mouse & click combination.

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Along with yourselves, a material percentage of the Labrys team are veterans.  Do you plan on continuing this trend and how do you think that affects your internal operations?

Yes, we are always interested in retaining and expanding the veteran community within Labrys. Whilst we founded our business with military heritage and applications, fundamentally we are a technical business, and at present we have had several fantastic team members join from the commercial sector. Most recently we are delighted with having managed to secure a new Product Manager with a strong background in cloud cybersecurity.

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How has your technology progressed since company inception to today?

In the summer of 2020 in London, we drafted our first design of the interface that we needed to build to solve our own problems evolving around data verification, user verification, global team coordination and compliant payments onto a flip chart. From then, we had our first engineer and architect build out the early version and bootstrapped that process until we got to a phase of product maturity in 2022 when clients from a range of different sectors (from Big Pharma, Development, Risk and Defence) were expressing interest in it as a SaaS product.

2023 was a key year for our tech progress as we managed to secure PMF with paying users, and our platform was tested on a range of live projects where there was zero tolerance for a malfunction - and where the system performed well. Following your investment into the business, our first external capital, in the summer of 2023 we secured seed round funding with a range of other Venture Investors, so we have been lucky to be able to scale the engineering team to meet the tough and ongoing challenge of building a simple and useable front-end product.

Simultaneously we have been dealing with the complexity of integrating multiple technologies and making sure that cloud infrastructure, scalability and secure deployment models are aligned with a range of current and future customer preferences.

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What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since launching the company?

We are not particularly big fans of delivering wisdom, especially as we are still early in the journey of product building. However, my view would be that if you have an insight into a new capability that can solve problems and contribute to the greater good, you just need to back yourself, don't hesitate, go and build it, and fear nothing.

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Do you have any news on contracts, products, or pipeline we can share?

Our primary focus now involves a new product version release and corresponding launch for Q2 this year, and a very exciting subsequent product roadmap which has been informed through client feedback and requests over the past 12 months.

Over the past 6 months we have acquired new clients across the Development, NGO, Commercial & Defence space (with use-cases ranging from Ocean Health and Climate Monitoring, Humanitarian Crisis Coordination, Investment Banking Intelligence, Religious minority protection, all the way to embedding our solution as a Digital C2 capability within training and operational cycles within Defence.

Our focus is, and always will be on the long and tough process of product optimisation, but by March 2024 we are on track towards fulfilling our ambitious 2024 revenue target. Whilst nothing is certain, our trajectory is currently looking very exciting indeed, and we are already planning for 2025 as a key year for product maturity and commercials.

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Which geographies will you be focusing on most moving forward?

For now, our Defence product offering is limited to UK and US - with a view towards expanding into NATO partners in 2025. Our Commercial product offering is global and not restricted by geography- and we have been building some very exciting relationships across several key continents this past year.

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How do you plan on retaining your lead in an increasingly competitive and crowded market?

Competition will propel the best solution into the hands of the end user - so this is good for us!

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Find out more: www.labrys.tech

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About MD One Ventures:

Founded in 2021 as Europe's first National Security specialist VC, MD One Ventures is a Venture Capital firm, investing in Pre- Seed to Series A National Security technology companies.

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