Before GitGuardian was a company, it was a side project. We were two data scientists looking for the answer to one question: how prevalent were leaked secrets on GitHub? So we built a system that scanned every public commit in real time. The scale of what people were exposing- passwords, cloud keys, the credentials that run real businesses- was far larger than we could have imagined.

The first product we ever shipped did not make us a cent. It sent an email. When our system saw a developer expose a secret in public, it told them, so they could revoke it before someone else used it. We called it the Good Samaritan Program . For eight years, it has done one thing: warn strangers, thousands of times a day. That email is how a lot of people first met GitGuardian, and it helped make us the most installed security application on the GitHub Marketplace.

The missing piece was scale

For most of those nine years, the program reached individuals.…