Podcast Ep 339: When F5 acquired Irish AI security firm CalypsoAI last year for $180m, the less-told story was how a deliberate brand strategy proved to be the lever that made the difference.
Last year we reported how Irish company CalypsoAI was acquired by tech giant F5 for $180m to supercharge the global tech giant’s capabilities in the AI space. But the technology was just part – albeit a significant part – of the story.
In the latest ThinkBusiness Podcast, Donnchadh Casey, CalypsoAI’s founder and CEO, and David Blendis, strategy director at Rowdy Studio, explain why brand was the strategic lever that made the difference.
The Irish tech company CalypsoAI was initially strong in the niche US federal market. With the onset of GenAI the business pivoted in 2023 to a more commercial AI focus.
“In a crowded market like AI, the company with the stronger brand message and the stronger emotional resonance around the buying decision wins nine times out of ten”
Collaborating with Rowdy, a London-based branding business led by Irishwoman Lisa Clarke, a new brand message centred on “We Go First” to lead AI security responsibly was developed.
Combined with an innovative product, the branding was a success and attracted large customers and potential acquirers, ultimately culminating in CalypsoAI’s acquisition by F5, one of the most established names in global network security.
The lesson? In fast-moving categories like AI, it’s not just what you build, but how you’re perceived. CalypsoAI didn’t just compete in AI security – it helped define it. And that positioning can directly influence who gets acquired, and for how much.
What brand actually means
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CalypsoAI was founded in 2018, years before generative AI as we know it became a mainstream phenomenon. It spent its first five years working with the US government and the federal sector to build secure AI models.
It was a respected business with a solid reputation in what is a narrow focused community.
And then ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 and the gen AI revolution was sparked.
For Casey, it was an all-or-nothing Rubicon to cross. The business shifted its entire focus to the commercial sector
“The decision we made, which was fairly brave at the time, was to completely burn the boats on the old business. It’s very hard to walk away from paying customers, and we did that, because we believed the market we were moving into was going to be a very big one, and one that needed all hands on deck. That brought us to a crossroads: a brand-new market, a brand-new set of customers, dealing with a problem they’d never had before, and they were looking for a solution and a partner they could trust, not just then, but into the future.”
Casey was already convinced of the importance of brand in terms of business strategy. “I’d come from a background where I’d seen brand used as a genuine strategic advantage, as a way to become the de facto leader in an industry and the de facto choice. And internally, we were going through our own journey: who were we as the 2.0 version of the company? How were we going to speak about ourselves, to customers and to the people we were trying to hire? That’s where we engaged with our friends at Rowdy. It would have been a terrible missed opportunity, when revisiting your brand, not to look at the whole problem together. A lot of people think brand just means a logo and a colour palette. For us, it wasn’t that at all. It was about the direction of the business, how you embody your culture, and how you get people to trust you for the long term.”
For David Blendis, branding is a foundational aspect of running a business. “Really, brand is your reputation. The origin of the word comes from farmers literally branding their cattle. Everyone is selling cows, so it’s the brand you put on your product that communicates the values behind it. How you treat the cattle, how you look after them, the principles of the farmer: all of that is contained in the brand, and it’s what makes people choose one over another.
“It’s the same for any product. When we started working with CalypsoAI, we learned two things very quickly: they had a category-leading product, and they had an extraordinary culture. When we spoke to Donnchadh and the team, they believed so much in the importance of AI security, and in how useful AI could be for everyone if used responsibly. There was almost a sense of responsibility: somebody had to do this, because if they don’t, this emerging category isn’t going to emerge in the right way.
“That idea became the heart of the brand. We called it ‘We go first, so the world can follow.’ It came almost directly from the conversations we had with the Calypso team. And then from that idea, we built out a graphic device based on the concept of slipstream: going first to create the slipstream that everybody else can benefit from. That influenced the logo, the graphic language, the behaviour at trade shows, the thought leadership. We even co-developed an idea together for a responsible AI league table, representing that notion of CalypsoAI going first so others could benefit from the work they were doing.”
Casey says the exercise changed how the company thought about itself as much as how it presented itself externally. “Internally, it was about how we speak in company all-hands, how we recruit, what values we align to when deciding the people who get to work here: all of those things were part of the conversation from a brand perspective.
“For enterprise customers, what they’re really asking is: am I comfortable making this bet? Customers were sometimes betting their career on us. To make them fully comfortable, it needs to look like a duck, walk like a duck, and quack like a duck. The combined performance of your product, the brand messaging wrapped around it, and the vision you project for the category you’re developing: all of that together adds up to the customer saying, it’s the right product, it’s testing well, and these are the right people to make a bet on.”
CalypsoAI had strong trade winds at its back in the form of analyst recognition from Gartner and Forrester because the business spoke fluently to the industry about its product and where the category was going. It was receiving strong press and customers were expressing deep satisfaction.
Living up to a brand promise
So did brand position play a direct role in the company’s acquisition by F5? Casey said the combined brand promise made it an elegant fit for F5.
“F5 is an iconic brand, around 30 years in the market, a leader in its space, a company that enterprise customers would have no problem putting their career on. What F5 didn’t have was a cutting-edge product operating in what is now the most talked-about area of technology, with a team that had a growth mindset and a clear vision.
“Combine F5’s reliability and enterprise trust with CalypsoAI’s product and AI-first culture, and you have something very potent. Every customer then gets the sexy start-up with the strong product and the vision, and the company trusted by thousands of the largest enterprises in the world. That combined value proposition made the fit obvious before the commercial conversation even began.”
Casey added: “You have a choice: let the market come to its own conclusions abut you, or materially influence how they think. The answer is clearly to get ahead of it.”
The bottom line for tech founders and start-up entrepreneurs is to wrap branding tightly with the product to create a strong message to the market. The answer is a message and a promise to customers that the business will live by and deliver on.
“Brand isn’t decoration,” Blendis said. “A lot of businesses see brand as those visual decorative elements, the logo, the colour palette. The message I would get across is that brand is a strategic tool for realising the objectives and ambitions of your business. If you want to lead a category, switch into a new product area, move into a new region, or achieve any strategic goal, brand is the thing that allows you to position yourself reputationally to achieve it.”
Casey concluded? “You have a choice. Do you want the market to come to its own conclusions about how they should think about you, or do you want to materially influence that, alongside shaping your own company culture and fulfilling your brand promise? The answer is clearly to get ahead of it.
“Most founders are a little snobby about it, thinking the product will speak for itself and eventually people will recognise the brand is associated with a great product. But why wait? Brand is an accelerated catalyst: it reinforces what people should be thinking when they look at your product and brings them to the right conclusion a lot faster.
“In a crowded market like AI, even all things being equal, the company with the stronger brand message and the stronger emotional resonance around the buying decision wins nine times out of ten.”
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Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
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Spotify
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SoundCloud
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Apple
