Why Vaulttree Spent 9 Years Building Before Raising a Dollar

The startup playbook is clear: raise pre-seed in six months, ship an MVP in three, iterate based on customer feedback. Vaulttree ignored all of it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ryan Lasmaili, Co-Founder and CEO of Vaulttree, revealed that his team spent nine years working on their encryption technology before raising their first funding. Nine years of day jobs. Nine years of evenings and weekends.

This isn’t about being stubborn. It’s about understanding when traditional startup advice doesn’t apply.

The Problem That Demanded Patience

Vaulttree wasn’t optimizing conversion funnels. They were solving one of cryptography’s fundamental problems: how to process encrypted data without ever decrypting it.

“We really started around learning how the science and then understanding one, the mathematics around encryption, and two, the science around from a computer science perspective, the hardware and the engineering element, how to potentially solve this problem,” Ryan explained.

This wasn’t a problem you could MVP your way through. You can’t ship “homomorphic encryption lite” and iterate. Either the mathematics works or it doesn’t.

The team recognized this early. “And that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been sticking to it, to our guns, working day jobs and at the same time in the evenings, on weekends, working away on how we can solve this.”

Why Day Jobs Made Sense

Most startup advice treats day jobs as the enemy of entrepreneurship. Get funded. Go full-time. Move fast. But Ryan’s team made a different calculation.

Day jobs provided three critical advantages.

First, financial runway. Without the pressure of a ticking funding clock, the team could focus on solving the problem correctly rather than quickly.

Second, mental space. The pressure of being a funded startup with investor expectations and board meetings would have distracted from deep technical work. Day jobs separated financial survival from technical breakthrough.

Third, validation. By the time they were ready to raise, they had something that actually worked. “I’m happy to say we have, and it’s been one incredible journey.”

The GTM Advantage of Waiting

Those nine years didn’t just create better technology. They created a fundamentally different go-to-market position.

When Vaulttree finally went to market, they weren’t selling potential. They were demonstrating proof. That CISO who joined a call saying “this is not possible”? Vaulttree could immediately prove him wrong.

“In the end we showed a demo and he was tipping out. He was sitting on the edge of the seat. We were seeing that because he was tipped back and forth the whole time, but he fell off his chair,” Ryan recounted.

Breakthrough technology faces unique sales challenges. Customers don’t just need to believe your product works—they need to believe the underlying approach is possible. Vaulttree’s nine years eliminated that skepticism gap.

The patience also shaped their product in ways that accelerated GTM. Because they spent years understanding the problem deeply, they built a solution that works with existing tech stacks. “Any organization can use this utilizing their existing tech stacks, utilizing their own databases. We don’t hold any data, we don’t have another, let’s say proxy or workaround solution.”

When This Path Makes Sense

Not every startup should spend nine years in stealth. But certain conditions make this path optimal.

First, truly hard technical problems. If you’re solving something that requires genuine breakthroughs, speed might be your enemy. Ryan’s team was working on what he describes as “the first fully functioning global, fully homomorphic and searchable encryption technology as such.”

Second, binary outcomes. When there’s no minimum viable version—when it either works or it doesn’t—extended development makes sense.

Third, education challenges. The market needed time to understand the problem. “Every single day we have a new data breach, we have data being leaked,” Ryan noted. Each headline educated the market about why current approaches don’t work.

Fourth, category creation. When you’re creating an entirely new category, you need a complete vision. “This technology in the space we’re in, right, this is without doubt the future. The future being encrypted. That’s it, literally,” Ryan explained.

The Risks You Accept

Choosing this path means accepting specific risks.

You risk solving a problem the market doesn’t care about. Nine years is a long time—technologies and priorities shift. Vaulttree bet that data breaches would remain critical.

You risk someone else solving it faster. While Vaulttree worked in obscurity, well-funded competitors could have cracked the same problem.

You risk personal opportunity cost. Nine years is significant. The team could have built multiple companies in that time.

What This Means for Founders

If you’re working on genuinely hard technical problems, here’s what Vaulttree’s journey suggests.

Don’t let funding timelines dictate technical timelines. If the problem needs three years, spending two years fundraising and one year solving it is backwards. Give yourself the time the problem requires.

Day jobs aren’t failure—they’re strategy. The startup world treats employment as uncommitted. But for deep technical work, financial stability might enable breakthrough thinking.

Complete solutions create better GTM positions. Vaulttree spent nine years building. But once they launched, their sales cycle is remarkably efficient: “Basically every conversation usually we have with an organization ends up in us moving this along to either a pilot, a POC and a customer.”

Trust your understanding of the problem. Ryan’s team believed the problem was hard enough to justify nine years. The market would have said move faster. They stuck to their conviction.

The Patience Paradox

Spending nine years before raising funding positioned Vaulttree to move faster once they launched. They don’t face the education burden of teaching customers that homomorphic encryption is theoretically possible—they demonstrate it works. They don’t face integration challenges—their solution works with existing stacks.

The patience to move slowly on technical breakthrough created the foundation to move quickly on go-to-market.

For founders working on genuinely hard problems, Vaulttree’s journey offers permission to ignore startup timelines that don’t fit your reality. Not every company needs nine years. But if yours does, that’s okay. The traditional playbook assumes you’re building a standard startup. If you’re not, write your own.