About Kaperbrief
A letter of marque for the digital age.
Kaperbrief is the Dutch word for a letter of marque — the sovereign licence that once turned a private ship and crew into a legitimate force at sea. Issued here, in the old Dutch Republic, from the same harbours as our home city of Amsterdam, it handed ordinary people an extraordinary mandate: to do the bold, unconventional, difficult thing — openly and legitimately. We took the name because that is exactly how we work.
The name
What a kaperbrief actually was
A “kaper” was a privateer — a private captain, not a navy. A “brief” was a letter. Together, a kaperbrief was the written commission a ruler granted that captain: a mandate defining exactly what he was authorised to do. Within its bounds, everything he did was legitimate. Without it, the very same actions made him a pirate.
It is a small, precise piece of history — and a near-perfect description of good security work. The skills are identical whether they are used to protect or to plunder. What separates the two is never the tool. It is the mandate: the letter, the permission, scoped and signed in advance.
So we are the privateers — independent, resourceful, and unafraid of the hard problem. And we never sail without our letter of marque: yours.
What we stand for
Four things we believe
Forged in the real world
Our solutions come from the field, not the whiteboard. They were built and battle-tested on thousands of different machines, operating systems and setups, over many years of solving problems that only ever surface in real life — the messy, undocumented, this-should-not-be-happening kind. Out-of-the-box thinking, for us, is not a slogan. It is what years in the trenches leave you with.
Freedom over restriction
We believe in owning your tools, your data and your infrastructure outright — and in reaching for whatever genuinely solves the problem, not whatever a vendor happens to permit. Restriction is comfortable, and it is safe. It is rarely the reason anything remarkable ever got built.
Ethics as our compass
We keep to the law, and we believe in the system that upholds it. But the law is a floor to stand on, not a ceiling to reach for. History has shown, more than once, that something can be entirely legal and still be wrong — so we never stop at “is it allowed?”. We ask “is it right?”. For people trusted to break into systems, that question is not philosophy. It is the whole job.
Always under mandate
A privateer without a letter of marque was just a pirate — and we never forget the difference. Every offensive engagement we run, every scan and every simulated attack, happens only under your explicit, written authorization, scoped in advance and signed by you. That mandate is your kaperbrief. We do not sail without it.
Bold work, honest mandate.
That is the idea behind the name, and behind the company. If it is how you want your AI, software and security built, we should talk.