Vendor lineage
Proteus - the Brazilian half
Brazilian security company bought by Patria in 2021 and merged into SEK.
Proteus was the Brazilian information security company Patria Investimentos acquired in 2021, and one of the two firms combined in 2023 to create SEK.
It appears here as half of a merger rather than in its own right, and that is the honest shape of what is reachable: the coverage of the transaction is extensive and the coverage of the company before it is thin. A firm can be substantial enough to anchor a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar consolidation strategy and still leave most of its own history unwritten.
The pairing is the point in any case. A Chilean company and a Brazilian one were bought to be combined, which means the buyer was reading the region as a single market before either company was.
Its origin is documented and its founding year is not, which is an unusual combination worth stating plainly. Exame traced the company to 1995, when Joao Mendes Carvalho and Marcelo Weyne Romcy, computer science students at the Universidade Federal do Ceara, built a CD that walked a user through getting online and sold it to a hundred internet providers around the country. They then spent six months studying network security before building the assessment tool the business was made of, took the company from Ceara to Sao Paulo, and later opened in the United States. Whether 1995 is the founding of the company or the beginning of the partnership that produced it, the sources do not say.