Company: Flare
Founder: Mathieu Lavoie, Lea Halle, Yohan Trepanier Montpetit
Website: https://flare.io/
About Flare
Flare was founded in 2017 by co-founders Mathieu Lavoie, Lea Halle and Yohan Trepanier Montpetit after years spent on red teams in financial services and banking. They had watched cybercriminals trade stolen credentials and network access across dark web forums, marketplaces and Telegram channels while targeted organisations had no way to see it. Their goal was to take the knowledge and expertise that only large banks could afford and make it available to any organisation, regardless of size or level of in-house skill. That mission, to democratise threat intelligence, still defines the company.
Today, Flare, led by CEO Norman Menz, delivers identity security and threat intelligence for the AI era. Customers provide a core set of identifiers such as domains, VIP names, email addresses, IP ranges and project names. Flare expands those terms, collects continuously across the clear web, dark web and illicit Telegram channels, then structures and analyses the data with AI to assign precise risk levels to activities and actors. Teams see everything in one intuitive interface with proactive alerts and can search illicit sources safely and anonymously. The platform indexes content in any language and character set, builds profiles of cybercriminals from scattered data points, and uses natural language processing to link different usernames that belong to the same actor.
Building that capability was the hard part. The intellectual property is a combination of systems built over years of research and development to collect, structure and analyse cybercrime data from hostile, constantly shifting sources. Making it usable was equally important. Flare can be set up in as little as 15 minutes, works for junior analysts and lean teams, and plugs into Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Slack, Teams, Jira and ServiceNow or any environment through its REST API. The company is SOC 2 Type II audited, encrypts all data at rest and in transit, and now supports customers in more than 50 countries after raising a 30-million-dollar Series B led by Base10 Partners and a further 30 million dollars in growth capital.
Flare has made a significant impact on the industry. It has supported the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in taking down one of the largest dark web marketplaces in the world and works with law enforcement to bridge the gap between them, financial institutions and regulators. A leading managed security service provider cut dark web investigation time by 97 percent using Flare. Its data now draws on more than 20 billion leaked credentials and 12,000 Telegram channels, and its research on stealer logs is widely cited, including as a contributor to the Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report. Flare is an FS-ISAC Affiliate Partner, a Health-ISAC Community Champion and a member of the Retail and Hospitality ISAC.
In 2026 Flare was one of 17 vendors included in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cyber Threat Intelligence Technologies, with specific recognition for its identity exposure management, and was named Most Innovative Cyber Threat Intelligence Platform in The Hacker News Cybersecurity Stars Awards.
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