Infinite Outdoors × Sythe Labs.
A four-person engineering team was holding landowner identities, member payment data, and property access information across 2 million acres - with no security function behind it. A Series A made that untenable.
“Sythe gave a four-person engineering team a security department.”
Who Infinite Outdoors is.
Infinite Outdoors is a conservation-focused outdoor access platform. It connects outdoorsmen and women with private landowners across more than 2 million acres in 20 states - for hunting, fishing, hiking, biking, birding, or anything else you want to do outside while escaping the crowds.
That makes it a two-sided marketplace with an unusual pairing of stakes. On one side are landowners opening private property. On the other are members paying to go somewhere they have never been, arranged through someone they have never met.
Running it: four engineers, and no dedicated security function.
What made it urgent.
The Series A in Q1 2026 forced the issue. Diligence has a way of showing you what you actually have, and what it showed was security review scattered across different systems, with the data room consuming time the engineering team did not have.
Underneath the paperwork was the real problem. A small team was holding landowner identities, member payment data, and property access information, and there was nobody whose job it was to think about that. Infinite Outdoors wanted it handled deliberately rather than reactively.
Hiring for it was not realistic at their size. Waiting was no longer an option either.
Two sides, two different fears.
Landowners and members are both trusting the platform, but not with the same thing - and the generic mandate to protect the data would have flattened the difference.
Landowners are sensitive about their contact information for a concrete reason: they are constantly pestered with inquiries about leasing and selling their land. Being able to show them how far the platform goes to keep that contained, and to share it only with the parties who need it, is what makes the relationship possible. Property boundaries and access points carry the same weight and need the same channels.
Members are handing over payment details and personal information to book access to land they have never visited, often through someone they have never met. They need to know both the transaction and their own information are handled properly - and their safety on the property depends on that same communication being clear and reliable.
We treated those as two distinct problems rather than one generic “protect the data” mandate, because the failure modes and the people carrying the risk are different on each side.
What the platform knows.
Infinite Outdoors stores which landowners have opened their land, how to reach them, where the access points and gates are, what they are paid, and who is on the property at any given time. A leak of any of it would damage the landowner relationship the business runs on.
Money moves through the platform between people who have never met, which makes account takeover and payout fraud the failure modes that would do the most damage to trust on both sides. Fraud is not what brought Infinite Outdoors to us, but it is a large part of why the relationship matters, and it gets disproportionate attention because of it.
Before, much of this lived as tribal knowledge in the founders' heads. Now it is a structure for deciding what gets protected how - and a team to check the work against.
When it clicked.
The Series A data room had been a full-time job. Every request meant hunting through repos, configs, and the CTO's own memory.
The moment it changed was the first request that arrived after the program was stood up. Instead of a search, it was a dashboard: everything making up their compliance requirements in one place, current, with the evidence attached. What used to be an afternoon took a few minutes - answerable by asking the AI tooling directly, or by asking our team when it wanted a human read.
Results.
A managed security department, on a platform Infinite Outdoors runs themselves, with our team behind it.
- -A security function that exists, instead of a responsibility spread across four engineers who already had jobs.
- -The data room stopped being a full-time job. Diligence requests that used to take an afternoon of hunting through repos and configs take minutes.
- -Evidence in one place, current, attached to the controls it proves - answerable from a dashboard rather than from memory.
- -Landowner and member risk treated as two problems, because they are - not one generic mandate to protect the data.
- -Tribal knowledge written down.What gets protected, how, and why is now a structure rather than something held in the CTO's head.
- -A team to check their work against, on the platform they run themselves.
In their words.
The due diligence process illuminated how much security review was scattered across different systems, and maintaining the data room was sucking up all our time.David Rhine - CTO, Infinite Outdoors
Hiring a full-time security professional at our size was not realistic, but we knew we needed a more mature solution than relying on our in-house team and could not wait any longer.David Rhine - CTO, Infinite Outdoors
We no longer have to keep all of these pieces as tribal knowledge in our heads. Sythe gave us a structure for deciding what gets protected how, and a team to check our work against.David Rhine - CTO, Infinite Outdoors
“Sythe gave a four-person engineering team a security department.”David Rhine - CTO, Infinite Outdoors
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