When QOMPLX of Virginia acquired Hyperion Gray of North Carolina last month in a union of cybersecurity companies, it had some impact in Nova Scotia due to remote working.

Hyperion Gray’s Chief Technology Officer was Haligonian Jason Hopper, and he is now the Director of Internet Research at QOMPLX, a job he’s really enjoying.

Hopper’s experience illustrates a growing trend in Atlantic Canada (and elsewhere) as more and more people are able to work for far-flung companies. That means we’re seeing more people living in Atlantic Canada while working for companies based elsewhere. These include C-level executives, both on the technical and business side, who are helping to shape companies around the world.

“It’s been fantastic so far,” said Hopper in an interview when asked how things are going now that he’s working for QOMPLX (pronounced like “complex”). 

Hopper was working in Halifax a few years ago for Eyeread, which is best known by its brand name Squiggle Park, a company which gamifies reading lessons to help improve literacy among children. He also served as an adviser to Curv Health, which uses machine learning to analyze videos of people in motion, then uses that information to develop fitness routines to prevent or treat injuries. He continues to work with Curv.

A few years ago, he saw a job posting on Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers. There weren’t a lot of details but it involved cybersecurity research, a field that interested him. He talked with Alejandro Caceres, the Founder and CEO of Hyperion Gray, and they hit it off so Hopper joined the team.

With a widely distributed team of software engineers, data scientists and security experts, Hyperion Gray had come up with a few products that could help clients find the information they needed for their security solutions.

For example, one of its products is Omnisense, which scans every computer on the internet in search of anyone launching a broad-based cyber-attack. When it detects something, it notifies Hyperion Gray clients so they can take appropriate actions.

Another product is PunkSPIDER, which scans web pages and assesses them for security vulnerability.

Hopper, who was promoted to CTO last September, said the missing piece at Hyperion Gray was a sales team that could get the products in the hands of customers. The company was purchased by QOMPLX last month, so the products can be better placed with customers, including military and intelligence services in the U.S.

“Hyperion Gray’s unique approach to cybersecurity and intelligence furthers QOMPLX’s work for leading global organizations as a key cybersecurity and risk partner,” said QOMPLX Co-Founder and CEO Jason Crabtree in a statement. 

QOMPLX has a distributed staff so Hopper is continuing to work in Halifax, working with reseach and development projects that help the enlarged company build its offering for clients.

“They hired everyone and we became a new research and development division,” he said. “QOMPLX has tons of resources that we didn’t have and it lets us move into a whole new world.”