In Silicon Valley, the playbook is familiar: raise venture capital, chase growth, raise again, and repeat until IPO or acquisition. But Pukar Hamal, founder and CEO of SecurityPal AI, is charting a different path.
After raising a $21 million Series A in 2021, led by David Sacks’s Craft Ventures with backing from Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Hamal nearly hit a wall. By 2022, rising interest rates squeezed the VC market, and SecurityPal was just 14 months from running out of cash.
“It was a wake-up call,” Hamal said on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. He cut costs, made painful layoffs, and steered the company toward cash flow breakeven. Since then, SecurityPal has avoided additional rounds, even as AI funding booms in 2025.
The company, which uses AI to accelerate enterprise security due diligence for customers like Airtable, Figma, LangChain, and Grammarly, is now focused on what Hamal calls “durable growth.” Rather than chasing fast sales at the risk of churn, he prefers deliberate scaling that strengthens margins and customer retention.
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“Venture capital comes with its own price tag,” he said. “The more we raise, the more expectations there are to grow at all costs. I’d rather build a company that doesn’t need to keep raising to survive.”
Hamal isn’t anti-VC, he acknowledges that some start-ups must scale fast, but for Security Pal, the priority is profitable sustainability over hypergrowth.
