How Coana found its way into a billion-dollar success story in Silicon Valley

It was an incredibly difficult decision.

Anders Søndergaard emphasises the fourth word and leans forward across the table in the meeting room on the seventh floor, overlooking the country’s second-largest city.

For the past quarter of an hour, he has been talking about research into static analysis at Aarhus University. About the idea of selling data patterns to programmers to make it easier to update software code. About being brought in as co-founder and director of the spinout Coana. About the conversations with hundreds of software developers. About the backing from renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

Now, Anders Søndergaard has reached a turning point in the story, because in 2023, Coana decided to abandon its original business idea, despite the fact that everything had looked promising for several years.

“We realised that there was a great need amongst software developers to make it easier to update code, but that this was difficult to translate into business value for their managers. So we simply lacked buyers,” says Anders Søndergaard.

That realisation had gradually dawned on the four founders, who eventually felt compelled to return to their research material to see if there were other ways to turn their extensive knowledge of static analysis into a business.

“It was an incredibly difficult decision to make. Especially because, at that point, we’d hired people to work on the problem we thought we needed to solve. We’d also raised venture capital on the back of that story,” explains Anders Søndergaard.

Returning to an earlier idea

This turning point is worth dwelling on, because when he and the rest of the team found a new avenue to pursue – cybersecurity – the business potential became apparent so quickly that, in 2025, Coana was sold to Socket in Silicon Valley and is now part of a billion-dollar unicorn company.

Here in the high-rise at the Incuba research park, where Coana is still based, Anders Søndergaard is clear: the transition would not have been possible without the lead investor’s understanding and patience.

“From Sequoia’s perspective, it was riskier to push ahead with an unproven assumption than to assess what was worth pursuing. That sounds quite obvious. But at the time, we were, of course, quite fixated on certain expectations, so it was absolutely crucial to get that backing to explore a new avenue.”

The search led Coana to revisit an earlier idea of using static analysis to identify the vulnerabilities in software systems that companies’ security teams actually need to fix on a day-to-day basis amidst the plethora of alerts and warnings.

“We offered a kind of noise reduction, so that companies could focus on resolving just 20 per cent of the challenges rather than having to deal with all of them all the time,” Anders Søndergaard explains, referring to the shift, which involved hundreds of new conversations to understand and validate the market.

It soon became clear to Coana – whose name is a contraction of the words ‘Code’ and ‘Analysis’ – that demand was strong, as geopolitical tensions simply reinforced the need for cybersecurity solutions of all kinds.

Nearly 50 different tools

A few months after changing course, Coana sold its solution up front to a customer and was subsequently able to develop and sell simultaneously.

“It was a dream scenario,” says Anders Søndergaard of the business, which grew from four to nine employees during 2023.

The strategy was to create a scalable software-as-a-service product. Coana initially tailored its solution to a specific type of business facing the same security challenges, before developing a more sophisticated noise-reduction tool for a broader segment of the market.

The challenge, however, was that the business world was gradually drowning in cybersecurity solutions. On average, every software security team had to deal with nearly 50 different tools, which was completely unmanageable – both technically and in terms of contracts.

This meant that more and more companies preferred to enter into contracts with broad-based solution providers, so by the start of 2024 it became clear to Anders Søndergaard and the rest of the team that Coana would have to either develop a wider range of tools or create a far more advanced noise-reduction solution tailored to the largest and most vulnerable companies in the world.

Either option would require Coana to scale up significantly – particularly in the key US market, which was already a major focus for the company, not least because of its investor, Sequoia.

“That’s why the idea of selling the company began to take shape.”

Fundamental research is a competitive advantage

The sale process began in the summer of 2024 and really gained momentum as autumn turned to winter.

Several interested buyers were based on the US West Coast, so the Danish delegation flew back and forth across the Atlantic a number of times before it was announced in the spring of 2025 that Socket had acquired 100 per cent of Coana.

Many factors contributed to the choice of Socket, explains Anders Søndergaard. The two companies shared the same approach to technology, the same set of values, and their products complemented each other well, which increased the likelihood of a successful integration.

“Fortunately, we were right: it took just a few months to successfully integrate our technology and staff into Socket, which has just reached a billion-dollar valuation,” says the Danish CEO, who, like the rest of the team, has remained in Denmark for family reasons rather than moving to the US.

The team is now working to further develop the noise-reduction tool for Socket’s product portfolio, while Coana also gives Socket a foothold in Europe.

“Some extremely talented software developers come out of Aarhus University, so Coana also helps recruit that kind of talent. It’s not on a large scale – perhaps a couple of people a year,” explains Anders Søndergaard, who is responsible for leading Socket’s European expansion by recruiting people in all corners of the continent.

He expects the growing use of AI by developers and hackers to dominate the agenda in the coming years. But there is at least as much potential in turning more of the university’s research into concrete solutions, he says.

“AI is going to create a whole host of new challenges. We’ll need to turn research findings more quickly into new ventures, products, and solutions that can make a difference in society.”

Facts: Coana

Coana grew out of the research group led by Anders Møller, professor of computer science at Aarhus University. He founded the company in 2022 with his two PhD students, Martin Torp and Benjamin Barslev, and business developer Anders Søndergaard.

The company managed to raise around DKK 30 million from Sequoia Capital, Essence VC, private investors, Innovation Fund Denmark, and the European Innovation Council before being acquired by the US firm Socket in 2025.

Coana now operates as a subsidiary with 10 employees, led by Anders Søndergaard. Among other things, he has previously worked as a venture architect at the LEGO Group and as a business mentor at Innofounder.