Tempest - cybersecurity out of Recife - Brazil's largest specialist security firm, built outside the Sao Paulo axis and bought by an aircraft manufacturer.

Tempest is a Brazilian cybersecurity company founded and headquartered in Recife, with offices in Sao Paulo and London. Its portfolio spans consulting, managed security services, security software integration and identity protection, and roughly half its client base sits in the financial sector - the industry that funds security work first and most consistently.

Tempest was born in the year 2000 as a startup incubated at CESAR, inside Porto Digital, and its early sequence is documented by the company itself: it spun off from CESAR in 2003 to compete more directly in the Brazilian market, opened a Sao Paulo office in 2004, and launched managed security services in 2006.

That spin-off is the part worth marking. An institution created to keep technology people in Pernambuco incubated a security company and then let it leave the nest as an independent business - which is the intended outcome of a venture builder and, in Brazilian technology, a rarer one than the model's popularity suggests.

Embraer invested first in 2015 through an innovation fund in which the national development bank also participated, and took control in 2020. The company serves large enterprises, those with revenue above a billion reais, and that customer profile is what opened international accounts for it.

In 2026 Embraer and SPX announced that Tempest would merge with Vision Cybersecurity, forming a company with roughly seven hundred million reais of revenue and combining the large-account business with a mid-market one. An aircraft manufacturer ending up as a principal owner of Brazilian cybersecurity is a reminder that in this country the capital for security at scale has come from industry and development banks rather than from venture funds.

Tempest ↗

Fontes