Eldon Sprickerhoff graduated from the University of Waterloo in 1991 with a BMath in computer science. He later worked at a prime brokerage in New York, through the dot-com crash and the aftermath of 9/11.
In 2001 he came back to Canada and started eSentire with Edmund Dengler. He funded it with a $150,000 line of credit against his house. The first client was ING in New York, reached through a contact from his earlier bank work.
Growth was slow. It took about seven years to reach US$1 million in revenue, and early investors did not understand a services business. Vulnerability assessment consulting became the way into a recurring managed security service, and recurring revenue rose from about half of the business to more than 90%.
Warburg Pincus invested in 2017 and Kerry Bailey became CEO in 2018. In 2019 the headquarters moved from Cambridge to Waterloo and the company raised US$47 million. In February 2022 a US$325 million raise valued eSentire at about US$1.1 billion, with annual recurring revenue above US$100 million.