Toni de la Fuente

From Alfacar to Atlanta

He grew up in Alfacar, a village just outside Granada known for its bread and olive oil. In 2019 the Granada newspaper Ideal profiled him as he turned 40, describing how a software company he worked for had sent him to Atlanta, Georgia, where he was head of security operations and a product security architect.

His work spanned most corners of the field. He has described doing testing, hardening and red, blue and purple team work over more than two decades, mostly on the defensive side, and moving to cloud early: And I started doing stuff in the cloud back in 2012 or so. The Modern Cyber podcast introduced him as having more than 25 years in cybersecurity and more than a decade focused on cloud.

A Script Named After a Song

Prowler began as a fix for his own problem. In 2016, I was working in cloud security and constantly running into the same issue: tools for securing cloud environments were either too complicated, too opaque, or just didn't exist for what I needed. He wrote a shell script to audit AWS accounts for misconfigurations and treated it as a way to learn. The first 250 checks were his own work, he told Modern Cyber.

The name came from his favorite band. I found that the first song of the first album of Iron Maiden is, the name is Prowler. He decided it was a good name for a security scanner. Other engineers picked the tool up. What started as a weekend project quickly snowballed. He presented it at Black Hat Arsenal in 2018, when it had about 2,000 stars on GitHub, and contributors kept adding output formats, checks and compliance frameworks even though the whole tool was still a slow shell script, he recalled on Modern Cyber.

Two Years at AWS

Around 2019 he joined Amazon Web Services, a company he had tried to join several times. My dream job, he called it. He spent two years there in different roles while Prowler kept growing, and investors began to call. Working long hours on both, he decided to commit to Prowler and left AWS in February 2021, according to the Modern Cyber interview.

For a while he ran the project with a team of four, moving from writing most of the code to managing issues and users, and acting as what he called the project's client zero, he told the Contributor podcast. The first hires found him through the Prowler community and worked from wherever they lived, so the company became fully remote without planning to. He ran it from home: I live in the south of Spain, he said on the CEOdotcom show, adding that he was preparing to move to San Francisco, California.

Building the Company

He incorporated Prowler in February 2023 and raised a seed round three or four months later. Asked how hard that was, he said: It wasn't very, very difficult. But it wasn't easy either. A popular open-source project gave investors proof of demand. In April 2025 a $6.5 million extension led by Decibel took the seed total to $12.5 million, when Prowler counted more than 10 million downloads and 300 contributors, according to the announcement.

Prowler was picked for the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, and the company keeps bases in Alfacar and in Maine, El Independiente de Granada reported.

He presents openness as Prowler's main idea. You can see exactly what our security checks are doing, tailor them to your specific needs, and even contribute your own. Prowler's about page lists him as founder and CEO and notes his time at AWS.

Off the Clock

He is a triathlete who had been competing in Ironman races for seven years by 2019, training every day in swimming, cycling or running, according to Ideal. The same profile described a gathering he organizes with friends that they call the Jamazon Party, built around ham bought on Amazon, Alhambra beer and Alfacar olive oil, and said he planned to spend a few months that summer in Asia volunteering with a nonprofit on its technology and security. Iron Maiden remains his favorite band, which the Modern Cyber podcast noted when it introduced him as a fan.