Phosphorus was founded in 2017 by Chris Rouland (CEO), Earle Ady (CTO), and Rebecca Rouland (CFO). Chris Rouland is no newcomer to start-ups., having previously founded Bastille and Endgame. He also stood up the X-Force division at IBM where he was CTO and Distinguished Engineer.

Phosphorus was born from an epiphany. In 2016 Rouland read a paper from the University of Wisconsin analyzing a 13-years-long IoT DDOS attack (one of the earliest of its kind, primarily targeting Netgear devices). The paper showed that during this period, there was a hypothetical half-life of seven years for embedded routers to receive a patch. “I’m thinking,” he told SecurityWeek, “if all these little computers out there take seven years before half of them are patched, this is the biggest cybersecurity problem I have ever come across.”c