Meet Beskar, Winner of Startups of The Year 2024 in Fairfax County, Virginia

The special Startups of The Year 2024 Winners Interview series is a celebration of all this year’s Tech Champions. You’ve earned it! The HackerNoon community can’t wait to learn more about your journey!

Tell us about you.

At Beskar Inc., we make advanced cybersecurity simple. Our expert staff and our patented research in advanced encryption, secure application development, distributed computing, and artificial intelligence protects organizations from modern and emerging threats—without the expected complexity or cost. Our fully managed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution can manage your entire IT stack and cybersecurity needs with a single, streamlined line item. Our distributed database system can track your inventory, your accounting records, customer information, and more – all in a quantum-secure globally-distributed immutable encrypted system. Our team of cybersecurity and information technology experts are specialists at making your organization secure. Whether you're building IT systems from the ground up, looking to reduce risk and exposure across your enterprise, or achieve compliance with government requirements like CMMC, Beskar delivers peace of mind through cutting-edge security, operational efficiency, and unmatched flexibility.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

At Beskar, we believe that security and accessibility must be built into the foundations of data systems — not bolted on as afterthoughts. Our platform helps organizations move beyond traditional database models by offering native resilience against cyberattacks, insider threats, and even quantum decryption risks. Ultimately, our goal is to enable a world where secure collaboration is the default, and where innovation isn’t slowed down by fear over data breaches or loss of control.

What sets you apart from the competition?

While others are focused on incremental improvements, Beskar is fundamentally rethinking security and database architecture itself. Our unique integration of post-quantum encryption, distributed ledgers, and customizable secure application layers gives our users unprecedented control and auditability. We aren’t just another security feature — we’re building the next infrastructure layer for a safer internet. Our people — engineers, cryptographers, and visionaries — thrive on solving problems others are afraid to tackle, and that spirit runs through everything we build.

What does it mean for you to win this title?

Winning Startup of the Year from HackerNoon is a huge honor for our team. It’s not just validation of our inventions or our talented experts — it’s validation the purpose driving what we’re doing. This recognition energizes us even more to push the boundaries of security, resilience, and user-focus in the digital world.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to set out for this mission?

Our team is fearless. We are united by a deep respect for security, privacy, and innovation. We believe that you can’t just patch over fundamental problems — you have to redesign systems with security and resiliency as core engineering principles. Our company values curiosity, resilience, and a refusal to settle for “good enough.” That’s why we’re the right people for this mission: we are passionate, persistent, and pragmatic enough to make a real difference.

Looking back, what milestone was the biggest turning point for your startup?

Achieving product-market fit with enterprise clients was a major turning point. Hearing directly from customers that Beskar solved problems they had been grappling with for years — like selective data sharing without compromising security — proved we weren’t just building great technology, we were solving critical, real-world problems. That moment sharpened our focus and fueled our growth.

What’s one valuable lesson you learned this year that you’d pass on to other startups?

In 2024, we learned that resilience — not just agility — is what defines a lasting startup. Disruptions in technology, markets, and geopolitics will happen faster than you can pivot sometimes. You have to build your team, your culture, and your technology stack to withstand turbulence, not just react to it. Resilient systems and resilient people win in the long run.

How do you envision your industry evolving in the coming years, and how will your startup stay ahead?

The data security industry is at the edge of a massive shift. Quantum computing will break current encryption standards within the next decade, and regulatory environments will demand more transparency and accountability than ever. Beskar is already operating at that future standard — with quantum-resistant encryption and auditable, immutable data structures — so we’re ready not just to survive that shift, but to lead it.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2025?

We embrace the responsibility of this title to raise awareness about the urgency of quantum-safe data security and the need for end-to-end zero-trust architecture. More importantly, we will continue to make complicated security technology easy to use and accessible. Security and freedom are not things that can only be available to the few “haves” - at Beskar, we work every day to make this technology available to many.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2025?

We’re expanding this year into new industries, including financial and government sectors where security is not optional. We’re also releasing several key integrations that make it even easier for developers to build on Beskar’s architecture. And, importantly, we want to scale our impact by onboarding mission-driven organizations who value security and resiliency.

2024 has been crazy, with all the new techs, and all the geopolitics fluctuations. What are the impacts of these to your startup, and to your industry as a whole? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

The pace of AI innovation, geopolitical uncertainty, and rising cyber threats in 2024 only strengthened the need for what Beskar is building. Trust in digital systems has eroded, and many organizations now realize their old architectures can't keep up. We adapted by doubling down on our quantum-resilience work and by making our platform even more adaptable to rapidly changing threat environments. While 2024 was turbulent, it proved that building for long-term security and trust isn’t optional — it’s essential.