OUR TEAM

Lorica's founders have been friends for 20 years and bring a wealth of leadership and operational experience, from military operations to SaaS startups. Now, we're assembling the team that will bring mission-critical work into the modern era.

Ben Kallas

CO-FOUNDER & CEO

Ben commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps after college and was selected to become a ground intelligence officer. In that capacity, he deployed with the first Marine unit to re-enter Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2017. He developed the task force's intelligence architecture from scratch and developed intelligence-sharing relationships with units across the country.

He then transitioned to Marine reconnaissance and led a new, multidisciplinary intelligence collection team for the Marine Corps' experimental task force for island warfare in the western Pacific.

Ben holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College. He founded a company focused on preventing a critical mineral supply chain crisis in 2024 and began working full-time on Lorica in March 2025.

Mitch Main

CO-FOUNDER & CTO

Mitch is a software engineer and systems architect with more than a decade of experience building secure, scalable infrastructure for startups and enterprise clients. He has held engineering roles at multiple Seattle-area startups.

His expertise spans cloud infrastructure, deployment automation, and data systems, with experience across AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, and more. He has led projects integrating analytics and automation into production-grade environments, including a platform that automated royalty payments for a leading streaming service – delivered on time and under budget.

Mitch has implemented GDPR-compliant data protection, built CI/CD pipelines, and managed integrations across CRM, billing, and analytics systems. He has also mentored developers and supported distributed teams through remote-first onboarding and hiring frameworks.

He brings to Lorica a track record of building complex systems that are secure by design and optimized for scale.