Start-up of the Month: Webscreen Technology

Shortly after the remains of the biryani were taken away, the waiter asked for a job. Yes, the spirit of high-tech enterprise is alive and well, and dining on curries in Ascot...

Start-up hiring practises have changed a lot since the days when you could just stroll into a dot-com's offices and claim that the CEO hired you in the pub the night before.

If Gary Milo's company was a proper 1999-style start-up, that waiter would probably be dishing up sizzling PowerPoints as a business development director by now. Nonetheless, Webscreen is close to having some of the energy of a proper gold-rush era start-up - but with some handy added extras, like a business plan and a product.

It did at least make one dot-com style hire - the recruitment exec they hired to find a telesales staffer liked the job so much he took it himself. But it was a nice demonstration of the kind of energy that Webscreen has built up in a year when the IT industry has been in freefall all around it.

Webscreen is still a relatively small company, with just 12 UK employees and a couple in the US. They're based a stone's throw from the racecourse in Ascot, not quite in the heart of the 'Winnersh triangle' where many of the UK's biggest tech companies are based but close enough.

Its office is a converted manor house. The engineers work in what might well have been the sitting room, which is now hot, noisy, and crammed with monitors and racks of servers. The other staff have spacious offices in what probably used to be bedrooms.

The Webscreen product, like most good ideas, is based on a fairly simple principle. Websites get bombarded with a constant stream of junk traffic, mostly from apprentice hackers or 'script kiddies' who send in a stream of junk packets.

At their most extreme, however, these attacks can cripple a website completely. Several Microsoft websites were taken out of action in January 2001 and in May 2001 the website of the White House was taken out by so-called denial-of-service attacks. And the problem, if anything, is getting worse.

Former security consultant Gary Milo reckons he has a solution. Most previous attempts to deal with this problem attack it from the ISP side. But Milo's company produces a server box which sits between the internet and the company's web servers and literally 'screens' incoming data requests from the web. Hence the name, Webscreen.

The server detects whether the pattern of requests for data matches the behaviour of legitimate web surfers. If the pattern doesn't fit, it gets screened out, so the legitimate requests can get through.

One of the typical attacks that take a website down is called a 'flood' - a hacker takes over a number of third-party computers, and gets them to send requests for web pages to the site they're trying to attack. Soon the server starts getting more requests than it can handle and any legitimate user who tries to visit the site can't get through.

One of Webscreen's demos uses an 'attack engine' that simulates this kind of attack. Webscreen's chief developer, John Shallow, demonstrates how you can browse a copy of Webscreen's homepage even though the server hosting it is being hammered with this massive amount of bogus data.

It works by distinguishing the different sources of data and assigning them all a value about how much it trusts them - what the company calls a 'charm' rating. It's named after one of the different varieties of quark subatomic particles. Trust me.

Founder Milo started demoing a prototype of the solution at the end of 2000. The initial demonstrations were conducted in his house in Ascot, with the presentation in the living room and the demo on the kitchen table. "The worst bit was putting it away before the kids got to it," he says.

"Some people didn't get it at all but Saffron Hill Ventures got it in two minutes," he says. These VCs asked him to demo it again in their Clerkenwell offices, and soon signed up to become Webscreen's first backers.

"We were the only UK networking start-up to get VC money in 2001," Milo says, proudly.

Far from the traditional view of VCs as rapacious vulture capitalists, Milo says Saffron Hill has been nothing but supportive, bringing in logistics support, HR and even some customers.

Saffron Hill brought in East River Ventures, and they each provided half the company's $1.4m seed funding round. The VCs also extended the company a soft loan to fund the setting up of a small US office in Redwood Shores, near the centre of Silicon Valley.

It's useful to have a US presence but Milo is committed to keeping the main part of the company in the UK.

"I don't think the UK is a bad place to do development work," he says. "We get a lot of talented people and being outside the Valley gives us a chance to think about the product in a different way. I think in any large group of people you tend to get a fixed mindset and it's difficult to get outside it."

The one thing Webscreen doesn't yet have is customers. The company is in trials with some large financial institutions and it's looking for more distributors and value-added resellers. Milo hopes to have the first paying customers by the end of April.

Webscreen is selling an innovative product into one of the most robust sectors in the technology market - security. So the future looks bright.

One possible threat is the risk of copycat products flooding the market once Webscreen has proved its worth. Yet though the architecture of the system is intuitively very simple, Milo considers the software itself too sophisticated to be easily ripped off.

He says: "We've got some fairly wide patents out. Before the investment came in we had to do some big patent searches."

They're still waiting for revenues, so thinking about taking money out of the business through a float or a sale of the business is still some way off. For the moment, Milo and his colleagues are just enjoying the ride.

Says Milo: "We have very little concern about the exit. It's more a case of 'How much fun can we have before we get to the point that it becomes so compelling to exit that it doesn't make sense not to?'"

Got a start-up we should know about? Email editorial@silicon.com