Helder Antunes

The through-line

Antunes keeps returning to one gap in the market: the small and medium business sits between two well-served extremes and has been left out of both. "You secure at the lower end, you secure at the enterprise, and for some reason, this entire segment of the market has been forgotten" [1], and forgotten also means exposed. His answer is not a cheaper security appliance but the removal of the specialist the appliance normally requires. Everything else he argues about pricing, packaging, edge computing and go-to-market follows from that single premise.

The second thread running underneath is that the intelligence belongs at the edge and in the software, not in the box. He describes Veea as "a lab with creation of just a plethora of technologies" and SecureConnect as "probably our first packaging of something that we can cookie-cutter and make turnkey for the SMB market" [1], with the differentiation sitting in the VeeaONE platform, "it's the software that stitches all of this together" [1].

On why the SMB market has defeated everyone before

Asked what has blocked previous attempts, Antunes rejects the simple price explanation and reframes it. "It starts with price, but you have to break down the price issue. So, the price is not only the price of the device, it's the total cost of ownership" [1]. Plenty of vendors could reach the segment with a reasonably priced box, he argues, but the customer then needs IT expertise to manage it and to keep provisioning and updating security policies, and that recurring cost is what kills the deal. Automation is what changes the arithmetic: "Now, with AI and with the mechanisms that we have to automate all these processes, you take that element out of the equation. I think that's the game-changer" [1].

He is candid that the incumbents' architecture is part of the reason they never got there. Cisco has "fantastic layered protocol approaches to security" as you move up the stack, but "obviously, that can never apply to an SMB space, so that's one of the reasons why maybe they've never" reached it, whether for cost or footprint reasons [1]. The proof point he offers is a competitive refresh where the customer liked Fortinet but ran the numbers and concluded Veea would be "60% cheaper" over two to three years "because I don't need an expert to configure my security policies and monitor this network" [1].

On what is actually in the box

SecureConnect is described as firewall, DNS filtering and intrusion detection, combined with SD-WAN capabilities and encrypted tunnels between sites for a chain running, say, ten stores [1]. The VeeaONE platform above it covers security management and orchestration, an element called Insights that lets an operator "in real time, see what's going on", and the SD-WAN layer that Antunes considers critical for small and medium chains linking their stores [1]. He resists the framing of it as a next-generation firewall in consumer packaging: "It's much more than that" [1].

Deployment is where he claims the real advantage. The product ships with three profiles, an advanced, a common and a guest profile, "so that people with little or no IT expertise can just plug and play. Scan a QR code, it's up and running in 10 minutes" [1]. There is no truck roll: the box is procured through partners, shipped, registered via a phone app, and an administrator defines who is allowed on the network [1]. Two variants exist, a 5G unit and a fixed base unit over ethernet, and Antunes notes that many SMBs already have fiber, so the 5G model is often bought as failover rather than primary connectivity, which is also why launching through telcos makes sense [1]. Customers can "rip out, replace your existing insecure gateway", after which "all the devices that now plug behind this device are comprehensively secure, and it just runs" [1]. More capable customers can go in and tweak, blocking applications, IP addresses or YouTube [1].

On the edge device as a platform, not a gateway

Antunes insists the unit is "a true edge device. It's not just a connectivity gateway" [1]. It runs a Linux server with docker containers, so mission-critical applications can sit directly on it: "think of it's a system in one, whereas now everything is disjointed" [1]. Agentic AI runs on the device as well, enabling off-the-shelf cameras to be attached for facial recognition in a drugstore, or for site safety work with clients in the Washington DC and Maryland area who use it on construction sites to spot someone walking on without a hard hat or standing too close to heavy machinery [1]. "I mean, the sky's the limit" [1]. The value proposition, in his summary, is "the bundling that we've put together of the ease of use, the pre-canned security, the ease of management orchestration, and then the edge capability of the device itself and the ability to layer all services" [1].

On the Mexico beachhead and the route through telcos

Cybersecurity attacks in Mexico are "through the roof", and in the SMB space there is "little or no cybersecurity" [1]. The World Cup acted as the forcing function: the Mexican government issued mandates because "last thing we want is for millions of people to come to Mexico to enjoy the World Cup and you can't do a point-of-sale transaction because you just got hacked" [1]. Even businesses that can afford a security appliance frequently cannot afford an IT or InfoSec specialist to run it, which is precisely the constraint the packaging is designed around [1].

Segmentation work with local partners pointed away from the smallest end. "SMB, so if you look at the S, it's very small, mom and pop, small stores. So, our focus initially is more on the mid-size" [1], meaning drugstore chains, doctors' offices, retail chains, coffee shops and restaurants, with one of the Mexican pilots a restaurant chain that Antunes says was "tickled as pink" [1]. Pricing in Mexico runs around 900 dollars for the bundle of connectivity plan, device and security license, against enterprise-grade offerings "in the thousands of dollars" [1]. The work with América Móvil and Telcel is treated as validation, and the plan is Latin America first, with Brazil and Colombia looking "very similar" and the United States "not that much different" [1]. He has held meetings with AT Telecom and states plainly, "we want partners everywhere" [1]. A partner in Cancun serving high-end resorts and residences is considering taking the product into the home [1].

On security as a question of how much you want to spend

Antunes treats security as a continuum rather than a binary. "There's all levels of security. And security, I tend to equate it to motor racing, which is one of my passions. It's how much do you want to spend to go fast? Security is the same thing" [1]. That framing explains why he leads with security in a segment where the answer to the spending question has historically been close to zero, and why the bundled, pre-canned tier matters more than raw capability.

On innovation inside a large company, and on consolidation

His view of Cisco is affectionate and unsentimental at once. He joined in 1998, worked on embedding network security protocols into Cisco IOS through the k9 bundle, moved into IoT and connected car, and later into corporate development where his team ran due diligence on Cisco's M&A activity before he launched the company's worldwide innovation framework [1]. He estimates he was "privy to easily over 100" acquisition diligences [1] and declines to name a favourite: "it's hard to say, and maybe I'm being a little politically correct because I love all my children" [1], though he does not dispute that StrataCom was the most consequential [1]. On the East Coast talent question he recalls telling John Chambers, "You guys raided 495", and being corrected: "John, I wouldn't use that term raided. We enabled" [1].

He also has a clear read on his own fit inside scale. "Cisco changed a little bit. I'm more of a special ops versus large army guy. So, innovation is in my DNA. Cisco matured a little bit more" [1], and he still calls it "a fantastic company" that afforded him "the luxury to literally innovate" [1]. From the internal-innovation years he cites the Omega Network, built with chief security officer John Stewart under Charlie Giancarlo, as a deliberate exercise in eating their own dog food and testing on themselves before customers [1]. On the connected car work, he notes he was running Cisco's effort while Seval Oz ran the Skunkworks project at Google, more than a decade before the current state of the market [1]. He tracks the cybersecurity sector through that M&A lens, watching consolidation moves such as Cisco buying Splunk and Google buying Wiz and Mandiant, and Palo Alto's platformization push, against continued venture funding into a crowded field [1].

Takeaways

• The barrier to securing SMBs is not device price but total cost of ownership, specifically the IT or InfoSec specialist needed to configure and maintain policies; automating that away is what Antunes calls the game-changer [1].
• SecureConnect bundles firewall, DNS filtering, intrusion detection and SD-WAN with three preset profiles so a non-technical user can scan a QR code and be running in ten minutes, with no truck roll [1].
• One competitive evaluation against Fortinet produced a customer estimate of 60% lower cost over two to three years, driven by not needing an expert to run it [1].
• The Mexican bundle prices at roughly 900 dollars including connectivity plan, device and security licence, against enterprise-grade equivalents in the thousands [1].
• The unit is positioned as a true edge device, not a connectivity gateway: it runs Linux with docker containers and agentic AI, supporting uses like facial recognition in drugstores and hard-hat detection on construction sites [1].
• Target segment is the mid-size rather than mom-and-pop: drugstore chains, doctors' offices, retail chains, coffee shops and restaurants, with SD-WAN linking multi-store operations [1].
• Go-to-market runs through carriers, with América Móvil and Telcel as validation and Latin America, including Brazil and Colombia, as the next expansion, since the US market looks structurally similar [1].
• Antunes frames security as a spending continuum, comparing it to motor racing: "It's how much do you want to spend to go fast?" [1].