As cybercrime detection and prevention continue to dominate the corporate agenda, the past two days have seen major investments in cyber incident response start up Hexadite and cyber situational awareness company Digital Shadows.
Hexadite, which automates cyber responses from alert to investigation, announced yesterday (10 February) that it has closed an $8 million Series A funding round from Hewlett Packard Ventures, Ten Eleven Ventures, and YL Ventures, which also invested in Hexadite’s $2.5m seed round.
“The world’s attention is on cyber security, as cyber threats and hackers continue to evolve and perpetrate devastating breaches,’ said Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures. “Automating the entire end-to-end process from alert to investigation through actual resolution is the only approach that allows companies to scale their defenses. Hexadite is at the forefront of the movement to intelligent automation.”
The company plans to use the funds to accelerate research and development in Israel, expand its marketing and sales operations worldwide, and continue to build momentum for the industry’s first solution that fully automates cyber security incident response, Hexadite AIRS.
“Enterprises are desperate to close the gap between security event detection and resolution,” said Mark Hatfield, co-founder and general partner, Ten Eleven Ventures. “We were very impressed with the maturity of Hexadite’s solution; they are the only company we’ve seen that truly understands how to fully automate the end-to-end incident response lifecycle. Hexadite’s ability to add intelligent automation and orchestration to resolve security events is a great leap forward that addresses a vital need for customers.”
The Hexadite funding round came just a day after cyber situational awareness company Digital Shadows closed its Series B funding at $14 million, led by Trinity Ventures, with general partner Fred Wang joining the company’s board of directors. Existing investors Storm Ventures, TenEleven Ventures and Passion Capital also participated, and the company also welcomed new investor Paladin Capital Group.
Cyber situational awareness provides a view of an organisation’s digital footprint and the profile of their attackers, including potential threats, attacker profiles, evidence of sensitive data loss, or negative impacts to brand integrity. Digital Shadows SearchLight continuously monitors more than 100 million data sources in 27 languages across the visible, deep and dark web. Supported with expertise from the company’s intelligence operations team, it provides an “attacker’s eye view” of organisations’ exposed data and the risks requiring mitigation.
“Given Trinity’s long and successful history of investing in the cybersecurity market, we understand how cyber situational awareness has become critical for enterprises,” said Wang. “Digital Shadows’ remarkable growth and the rapid adoption of its SearchLight offering by large enterprises impressed us, as did its strong management team. Trinity’s investment will help Digital Shadows capitalize on the widespread demand for a solution that provides buyers with a ‘beyond the boundary’ view of their organizations.”