The field of cybersecurity demands continuous innovation, as experienced by Gustavo Celani, who has been working in the industry for the last decade, dedicating his entire professional career to the field of corporate security and now establishing himself as the visionary Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Cyber Innovation, a Brazilian cybersecurity company. Through his leadership role at Cyber Innovation, the company has been impacting many leading organizations around the world, such as NerdWallet, Flodesk, Solar Coca-Cola, EC-Council and Truelogic Software, along with several others.
Cyber Innovation represents much more than the growth of a business; it represents a fundamental shift in how successful companies obtain access to the most critical cybersecurity services in the industry. Additionally, within only 18 months of operation without having received any outside investment, Cyber Innovation has demonstrated incredible independence and the successful validation of its model by exceeding its first million in revenue across six different countries. This achievement exemplifies Cyber Innovation’s ability to disrupt traditional cybersecurity service models and highlights its capacity to drive meaningful change in the marketplace.
The goal of Cyber innovation, according to Celani, is to provide competitive access to high-level cybersecurity services in a manner that is cost-effective and strategic for small and medium-sized businesses, no matter where they are located throughout the world. “My purpose is to democratize cybersecurity and turn it into a real competitive advantage for all companies, transforming it into something measurable, strategic, and aligned with each business’s needs and stage,” he says. Cyber Innovation has developed an innovative approach to providing customers with what they need on demand in order to enable small and medium-sized businesses access to the same cutting-edge security protections as large corporations. “I believe the future of innovation is directly dependent on the digital security that supports it. So, by offering services in offensive security, application security, and executive leadership, we are effectively democratizing proactive digital defense on a global scale,” he adds.
The Systemic Problem: Ignored and Underserved
The formation of Cyber Innovation was born not from a single moment of genius, but from years of observing a crucial systemic problem across the entire digital economy: most businesses, particularly small and medium-sized ones, simply lacked access to the high-quality security expertise needed to survive. Celani’s career, spanning global tech giants (Samsung, Dell) and high-growth unicorns (Olist, Afterverse), confirmed this reality. He realized that while the cybersecurity talent gap was widening, the cost and complexity of security consulting remained prohibitive for the average company.
Celani saw companies investing in tools that were never fully implemented and suffering from shallow testing, with security processes completely disconnected from real business risks. This observation sparked a powerful question: What if world-class security—Red Team, AppSec, and executive management—could be as flexible and scalable as the cloud services that fuel modern innovation? This need for democratizing security became his mission.
Precision and Vision: The Leadership Equation
When Celani founded Cyber Innovation in early 2024, it was with a very clear vision: to bring enterprise-grade security to any size organization, anywhere in the world, through an accessible, on-demand, and impact-driven model.
His leadership philosophy, rooted in a blend of technical depth and strategic clarity, is central to this mission. He leads with a logical, structured, and results-oriented approach, believing that complexity is solvable when broken down into clear, actionable steps. This mindset ensures high standards of quality and consistency across all projects. Celani never separates leadership from expertise, ensuring he remains actively involved in offensive security and threat research. This union of technical mastery and vision has forged a culture at Cyber Innovation where excellence, transparency, and agility are the operational principles that successfully transform cybersecurity into a strategic advantage for every client.
The Brazilian Challenge: Growth Outpacing Security
Brazil’s accelerated digital transformation, fueled by a surge of AI-powered startups in fintech, e-commerce, and healthtech, has created a complex cybersecurity landscape. Celani notes that these innovative companies often grow faster than they mature in security. The majority of Brazil’s digital ecosystem consists of small and medium-sized businesses that operate with lean teams and intense market pressure. Consequently, basic security foundations are often introduced too late or not at all, leaving these organizations disproportionately vulnerable to data breaches and fraud.
Cyber Innovation was created to address this vulnerability by allowing companies to access enterprise-grade cybersecurity expertise on demand. Their flexible model permits clients to request exactly what they need—from penetration testing and secure development guidance to Red Team simulations—at a pace that matches their business moment. This approach transforms security from a luxury cost into an achievable operational necessity for business continuity.
Innovation as Clarity: Rethinking Security Delivery
For Celani, “innovation” in cybersecurity means constantly rethinking how security can be delivered, scaled, and integrated to create measurable value. It is about transforming complexity into clarity. His company challenged the premise that advanced security consulting must be reserved for large enterprises. Their on-demand model makes high-impact security both affordable and practical for companies of all sizes, which is an innovation in itself.
Beyond the business model, innovation lives in their technical practices. They constantly integrate offensive security methodologies, AI-driven tooling, and intelligence-based decision frameworks into their services. Celani ensures this remains embedded in their DNA by fostering a culture of continuous learning and curiosity, encouraging the team to challenge assumptions. Ultimately, this approach allows Cyber Innovation to transform cybersecurity from a technical requirement into a strategic advantage that empowers growth.
The Bridge: Translating Complexity into Business Value
Celani’s primary goal is to transform cybersecurity from a source of complexity into a driver of resilience. He achieves this by acting as “a bridge between hackers and business leaders.” His approach is built on accessibility, transparency, and measurable impact.
First, Cyber Innovation adopts a modular, on-demand service model that eliminates unnecessary rigidity, guiding leaders step-by-step through critical security decisions. Second, findings are translated into business-centric language: technical vulnerabilities are presented in terms of financial impact, operational risk, and regulatory exposure. Reports are designed for clarity, linking every identified risk to a concrete business outcome. Third, the team acts as an extension of the client’s internal operations, providing hands-on mentorship and training to ensure cybersecurity becomes a natural part of existing workflows, accelerating adoption and building internal capability.
Culture of Challenge: Curiosity and Accountability
Celani understands that resilience is human-driven. He cultivates a culture of creativity, continuous learning, and accountability by ensuring that curiosity is rewarded and experimentation is safe. His team constantly explores new offensive and defensive techniques, questioning assumptions to design novel approaches that stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape.
Learning is deeply embedded in the culture; Celani models this himself through his work as an EC-Council instructor and author of “Jornada Profissão Hacker,” promoting strategic thinking and cross-disciplinary skills. Accountability is built on transparency and ownership, where the team performs blameless post-mortems and discusses improvement opportunities openly. This culture is unified by a shared purpose: to protect innovation without restricting it. By combining curiosity, education, and responsibility, Celani ensures his team is capable of staying ahead of most of the threats that have not yet emerged.
Intentional Growth: Global Vision and Niche Focus
Cyber Innovation’s rapid growth was not accidental but the result of intentional strategic decisions led by Celani. The earliest and most impactful decision was establishing a clear global vision from day one, prioritizing scalability that allowed the fully bootstrapped company to operate in six countries quickly. Another critical turning point was defining a highly focused target audience: small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). By democratizing access to world-class cybersecurity for this underserved segment, Cyber Innovation created a unique competitive edge and became a trusted partner for organizations that previously could not afford or access high-level expertise.
This focus mandated the development of an innovative, on-demand service model, centered on agility and modularity. This flexible model allows companies to engage the firm for exactly what they need, without unnecessary long-term commitments. Crucially, the firm concentrates on proactive service pillars: Offensive Security, Application Security, and Cybersecurity Executive Management and Leadership, strengthening resilience before attacks occur and enhancing business continuity.
The Predictive Cycle: Anticipating Disruption
Cyber Innovation operates on the core belief that anticipating threats is far more valuable than merely reacting. Their methodology follows an adaptable cycle: Strategic Diagnosis, Action Plan, and Execution.
The Strategic Diagnosis phase maps the organization’s most relevant risks and identifies likely threat actors, ensuring focus on the real-world threats with the highest potential business impact. In the Action Plan phase, Celani rejects “universal best tools,” instead orchestrating tailored solutions—from cloud-native capabilities to open-source intelligence—to fit the client’s specific context, technology stack, and risk appetite. Execution then focuses on offensive testing and strengthening application security controls to uncover all vulnerabilities before real attackers can exploit them. A cornerstone of this methodology is visibility and executive orientation: helping organizations achieve a clear view of their digital assets, control gaps, and security posture evolution, enabling informed decisions and continuous improvement.
Collective Defense: Building Global Resilience
Celani recognizes that in cybersecurity, collaboration determines success. Cyber Innovation maintains close partnerships with technology providers, assessing and integrating leading tools—from static analysis to cloud-native protection—to ensure clients adopt solutions aligned with global best practices. This collaboration is symbiotic: the firm contributes real-world feedback that helps vendors enhance their detection capabilities and threat coverage.
Crucially, Celani actively engages with global cybersecurity communities to drive knowledge sharing. As a member of OWASP and a cybersecurity instructor for institutions like EC-Council, he actively contributes to open education, secure development initiatives, and adversarial emulation research. His training, talks, and mentorship efforts elevate the maturity of the entire ecosystem across Brazil, the U.S., and other regions, ensuring Cyber Innovation stays aligned with evolving attack techniques by continuously engaging with ethical hackers and researchers worldwide.
Fortifying the Human Firewall: Controls and Culture
Celani approaches the persistent threat of human error as an integrated ecosystem of training, culture building, and continuous reinforcement. The first line of defense is technical: implementing well-designed controls, secure-by-design practices, and continuous attack surface monitoring to ensure that even when errors occur, security guardrails limit the potential damage.
However, technology is only part of the solution. Celani firmly believes awareness remains the most powerful and transformative resource. Cyber Innovation provides training rooted in real-world offensive experience—using customized phishing simulations and red team exercises—to translate complex threats into clear behavioral guidance. This approach is holistic, empowering leaders to create policies and incentive structures that reinforce positive security habits, transforming the workforce from the biggest vulnerability into one of the strongest and most resilient layers of security.
Leading the Transition: Offensive AI and Quantum Readiness
Cyber Innovation is actively preparing for the next era of digital defense by treating technologies like AI and quantum computing as immediate catalysts for transformation. Recognizing that AI will enhance adversarial capabilities—from automated vulnerability discovery to phishing orchestration—Celani anchors the company’s strategy in deep research and real-world experimentation. His offensive-first perspective is a core differentiator, using these insights to design proactive defenses that anticipate attacker behavior before it materializes.
For the longer-term threat, Celani and Cyber Innovation are actively monitoring the transition toward post-quantum standards. Their goal is to guide organizations through this complex shift by advising on cryptographic readiness and supporting migration planning as NIST post-quantum algorithms become mainstream. Beyond technology, Celani ensures that the firm contributes to global upskilling efforts, empowering clients and professionals with the educational mindset needed to adopt new security paradigms responsibly and align innovation with business strategy.
The Legacy of Accessibility: Impact Beyond Revenue
Looking back, Celani hopes the lasting legacy of Cyber Innovation will be defined by the transformation it inspired in how organizations access security. His core mission was to challenge the idea that advanced security is a privilege reserved for large enterprises, proving that excellence, accessibility, and impact can coexist.
Celani aspires for Cyber Innovation to be remembered as a company that empowered organizations to grow safely and treat cybersecurity as a strategic enabler, not an afterthought. He hopes they contributed to breaking the cycles of complexity and inaccessibility that historically plagued the industry through their on-demand, flexible, and human-centric model. His vision extends to education and empowerment: inspiring a new generation of leaders who see this field as a force for progress, integrity, and societal protection.
The Final Charge: Passion, Fundamentals, and Humility
Celani’s advice to the next generation of Brazilian innovators is grounded in realism and optimism. He stresses that passion fuels resilience and is essential for navigating the challenging journey. He urges them to cultivate strong technical foundations, mastering networking, systems, and programming logic, as these fundamentals are their greatest asset for innovation.
Crucially, Gustavo Celani champions humility. He asserts that self-learning is a survival strategy in this fast-moving field, pushing innovators to accept that there will always be a new framework or attack surface to explore. He encourages a broad view across all security domains, ensuring strategic clarity. His final conviction: Brazilian professionals have everything they need to compete globally—talent, resilience, and creativity—and they should never underestimate their ability to create global impact from Brazil.
