Rickard Carlsson is the co-founder and chief executive of Detectify, an application security testing company in Stockholm, Sweden. He grew up outside Jönköping, raced skis at an elite level as a teenager, studied engineering physics, and worked as a management consultant at McKinsey before joining the ethical hackers who started Detectify.
A Childhood Outside Jönköping
Carlsson grew up in the countryside outside Jönköping, Sweden, where the nearest neighbor was 200 meters away. Detectify's profile of him says he spent his time building cabins and fixing things in the garage. He told the GOTO conference series: as a five, six, seven-year-old kid I dissembled everything, and I tried to change things.
He started competing in skiing at an elite level at 11, until an accident at 18 turned racing into a hobby. He chose engineering physics at Linköping University because, he said, Someone said that engineering physics was the toughest, so I chose it.
He still races in masters competitions and is a ski instructor.
From McKinsey to a Hacker Prototype
After university he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey in Stockholm and San Francisco for about three and a half years. He told GOTO he wanted to get back to more technical work, and that was when I was introduced to my technical cofounders that had started to write the prototype of Detectify.
The founders were ethical hackers who needed someone to turn their idea into a business. I met one of the early angel investors who told me I could jump on board an idea backed by some of the world’s best hackers. I could not say no to that
, he said. In 2015 the Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer listed him among the year's Supertalents.
Scaling Hackers' Knowledge
Carlsson describes Detectify as a way to scale scarce expertise. He told Safety Detectives that very few people understand web security deeply and the few (hackers and security researchers) who do are generally not employable. That knowledge gap is ultimately why organizations get breached.
Detectify turns submissions from freelance hackers into automated tests. In 2026 he described its approach as payload-validated assessments, submitting crafted payloads and verifying an observable response, so teams know that a reported issue represents a real, exploitable risk.
Sources
- Detectify blog: Meet the team, Rickard Carlsson
- GOTO: Bridging cybersecurity with Detectify
- Safety Detectives: Interview with Rickard Carlsson
- Detectify: About
- Detectify: Major Player in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for DAST (September 24, 2026)
- SaaSiest: Rickard Carlsson, hacking your way to triple-digit ARR growth
Sources retrieved October 28, 2026.
