Building the Future of Cybersecurity, One Brick at a Time: The Story of Adam Vincent and Bricklayer
Some founders build companies. Others build industries. And then there are the rare few, like Adam Vincent, who set out to reshape how people work, live, and interact with technology altogether.
Adam, Founder & CEO of Bricklayer, has always been a dreamer. Not in the abstract sense, but in the unwavering belief that technology can fundamentally change the human experience. For him, the entrance of agentic AI wasn’t just another innovation cycle. It’s the most disruptive shift of our lifetime — bigger than the internet, cloud, or mobile — and it presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild how cybersecurity teams operate and more broadly, how work gets done.
Where the Vision Began
Adam’s ambition to build something bigger than himself started early. Even as a kid, he talked about becoming a CEO and an inventor, driven by a desire to create new opportunities for himself and his family. He was the first in his family to go to college, but long before that, he was already carving his own path.
By high school, that determination had become action. He enlisted in the Air National Guard in 11th grade as his path out of a small town in upstate New York, and finished his senior year living with his grandmother (his third high school in four years). A volunteer role at a local elementary school led to an introduction that changed everything: a receptionist connected him to her son at a New York trading firm, where Adam, still in his teens, went from fast-food shifts to running the company’s computer network and building databases alongside IBM consultants.
The military later gave him a full ride to study computer science while continuing to serve. With his degree, hands-on IT experience, and a security clearance, he landed in Washington, D.C., first at the State Department and then, through a lucky connection, at MITRE.
MITRE is where the long-term vision took shape. Immersed in emerging connected-systems work and the early cloud architectures that would define modern software integration, Adam became a subject-matter expert and began imagining a cybersecurity ecosystem that was connected, collaborative, and ultimately autonomous.
That vision became his first startup, ThreatConnect, which he grew to $30M ARR over 12 years and pioneered a “hive mind” approach long before the industry caught on. In 2022, he stepped back briefly to take time to pause and reflect. But, when LLMs and generative AI arrived, the final piece of a dream he’d been pursuing since 2005 snapped into place, setting the stage for his next chapter.
From Vision to Reinvention: The Birth of Bricklayer
By late 2022, Adam could see something most others hadn’t yet grasped. Large language models and agentic AI would redefine work more profoundly than any technology shift in decades. It wasn’t just a new tool, it was a new workforce.
He incorporated Bricklayer in March 2023 and hired a small, elite engineering team soon after. Adam spent the next year and a half self-funding and quietly building what he believed would become the next paradigm in cybersecurity operations: a multi-agent AI system designed to perform the tedious, manual “bricks” of work that exhaust SOC teams.
The name Bricklayer came from a metaphor rooted in Adam’s own life. Growing up, he worked alongside his biological father, a stone mason, and learned how beautiful stone walls and patios were actually built — one heavy, painstaking stone at a time. Cybersecurity, he realized, wasn’t much different. Despite all the talk of automation, most operational work still happened one repetitive task at a time, carried out by highly trained teams who were burning out doing manual, blue-collar-level labor in a white-collar discipline.
Bricklayer was created to change that. If humans were stuck laying bricks by hand, Adam wanted AI agents to build the walls instead, freeing people to focus on strategy, creativity, and higher-order decisions, not fatigue.
Where competitors were launching single chatbots, Adam made a bold bet. Bricklayer would mirror how human teams operate using multiple agents with different specialties, working together, learning from each other, and adapting in real time. The industry would eventually call this approach the future. Adam called it day one.
Timing Meets Preparedness
Bricklayer launched commercially in January 2025 with modest expectations. Adam assumed that true enterprise adoption wouldn’t hit until the end 2025 or 2026. Instead, the market ignited almost overnight.
A staggering 78% of the first 47 enterprise meetings converted into sales-qualified opportunities. They’ve more than doubled ARR every quarter in 2025 and expect to do the same in Q4, all fueled by founder-led sales and almost no GTM team.
These early wins with large enterprises also signaled something bigger. Cybersecurity leaders weren’t just curious about AI, they were urgently reorganizing their operations around it.
Strategic support from Engage and Tech Square Ventures accelerated that momentum. Enterprise introductions, program structure, and credibility helped Bricklayer land critical early customers and sharpen its go-to-market motion. For Adam, those partnerships validated that the timing was right. The world was ready.
Leadership that Builds Builders
Despite his technical depth and visionary instincts, Adam refuses to center the story around himself. “It’s not the Adam show,” he says. His philosophy is simple: vision sparks the journey, commitment sustains it, and leadership is about empowering others, not being the hero.
At ThreatConnect, that mindset built a 12-year success story. At Bricklayer, it’s shaping the first 50 employees into a mission-driven team that sees their work as transformative, not transactional. Adam believes that when people truly understand the “why,” execution becomes instinctive and culture becomes a competitive advantage.
And underneath it all is that same dream, to reshape how people work. To free them from the exhaustion of manual processes. To let technology elevate human capability instead of draining it.
Adam’s Founder Equation
Adam Vincent stands at the forefront of a seismic shift, one where agentic AI redefines operational work across industries. Bricklayer is just the beginning of that transformation, built on a dream that has spanned decades.
Adam’s approach to building Bricklayer reflects the clear philosophy that entrepreneurship isn’t about the founder, but rather about the people who share the vision, do the work, and lead together. And when asked what he attributes his success to, Adam’s answer is no surprise:
“Vision + Hard Work & Commitment + Leadership.”
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