# Red Onion Overview ## The facts, in one place > [!info] Company and round > - **Company** — Red Onion Systems (redonionsystems.com), tagline "Packet truth, revealed" > - **Product** — **TelemetriX**, described as a resolver-preserving layer that turns raw DNS traffic into sovereign intelligence > - **Founder & CEO** — Phares Kariuki (Westcon/VMware East Africa, Angani, Node Africa, Pure Infrastructure) > - **Indicative round** — ~$600k, funding a 12-month execution plan; valuation and terms TBD > - **Phased plan** — ~$270k for 4-month MVP refinement and 1–2 pilot readiness; ~$600k for 12 months; ~$1.2m for 24 months to 30 clients and ~$2.4m run-rate > - **Team plan** — 4–6 FTE, majority in sales, BD and deployment, lean core engineering > - **Commercials** — $80k base ACV, 75–85% gross margin, 12–18 month sales cycle > - **Year 5 plan** — ~$25m run-rate, ~300 clients, 40% EBITDA margin, EBITDA positive from Year 2 ## Where it stands today > [!abstract] Current state > Initial product and a demoable architecture are in place. A PoC integration process is underway with a Singaporean telecom operator. Early-stage discussions are running with a Belgian bank on compliance-led retention. There is a demand signal from a major African telco alongside the founder's existing enterprise relationships. Axispoint, a global tech consulting firm, has signed up to support the solution. The website is a landing page with a waitlist. > > No paid production deployment yet. The round is explicitly aimed at converting the active pilots into signed contracts, and the milestones name exactly that: harden the MVP for production traffic and enterprise security review, complete one to two live pilots, convert at least one paid production deployment, and build a repeatable channel playbook. ## What the round is buying Mostly people. Product is in place, so the primary use of funds is enterprise sales and channel talent for Singapore, Belgium and continued African expansion. Secondary spend is product hardening (packet-loss protection, buffering, failover, routing policies, dashboards) and integrations (Infoblox DNSTAP, BIND, Splunk, Sentinel, AWS S3, Azure Data Lake, IAM). ## The shape of it Wedge is cost: reduce SIEM and analytics ingestion spend. Expansion is control: compliance archive, forensics, AI-ready data. Scale is channels: MSSPs, telcos, consultancies and cloud marketplaces. ## Related - [[Red Onion MOC]] - [[TelemetriX - Questions to Follow Up]] - [[The Business Model]] - [[The Founder and the Relationship Channel]] - [[Technical DD Framework]]