SpiderOak moves HQ to Reston, joins the Northern Virginia Space Hub
Cyber space resiliency company SpiderOak is reaching out for new horizons – not only has it segued its business operations from, well… Earth — to space on satellites — but has moved its headquarters to the Reston Town Center in Fairfax County. SpiderOak’s CEO Dave Pearah sat down with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority to talk about the company, its innovative technology and recent pivot to space, and why they chose to relocate from Kansas and Chicago to Fairfax County.
An industry veteran with more than two decades of engineering, product and business leadership across cybersecurity and the high-performance computing industry, Pearah joined SpiderOak as CEO in 2019. Previously he served as CEO of HDF Group, a federally focused software company in scientific computing, where he championed the creation of Enterprise and SaaS solutions built on the open-source core.
A U.S.-owned and operated software company, SpiderOak delivers end-to-end cybersecurity solutions for civil, military, and commercial space operations. Its commercially available products are built upon a foundation of zero-trust encryption and distributed ledger, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the most sensitive data in the space domain.
Officially opening the doors of its Reston office on April 10, 2023, SpiderOak is one of the latest of many space and satellite companies of all sizes to move to and set up shop in Northern Virginia, a burgeoning hub for space companies. In 2022, for example, Boeing and Raytheon announced moving their global corporate headquarters to Northern Virginia. Blue Origin opened an office in Reston last year.
SpiderOak’s jump to the space market is fairly recent – the company pivoted its operations to space in late 2020/early 2021, Pearah noted.
“The company has been around since 2007 serving consumers and businesses with that same end-to-end protection philosophy driven by zero-trust,” said Pearah. “We took those same ideas that we have been doing for over 15 years for consumers and businesses, and then found this huge opportunity in space.”
Deciding to become a space-based company was somewhat of a “Eureka” moment at SpiderOak.
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