At a glance.
- DigiCert acquires DNS Made Easy and affiliated brands.
- Air Force Research Laboratory awards $950 million contract to five small businesses.
- SentinelOne opens office in India.
Mergers and acquisitions.
Utah-based digital security company DigiCert has acquired Domain Name System (DNS) provider DNS Made Easy and its affiliated brands. Clearlake Capital Group L.P., Crosspoint Capital Partners L.P., and TA Associates backed DigiCert in the deal. “The integration of DigiCert and DNS Made Easy adds value to customers. In addition to providing excellent DNS services, this combination enhances the security of certificate validation and enables the automation of future validations, paving the way for automated certificate lifecycle management. This strategic acquisition showcases our commitment, in partnership with Clearlake, TA and the DigiCert team, to drive growth and expand DigiCert’s product offering,” says Greg Clark, managing partner at Crosspoint Capital Partners and chairman of DigiCert’s board of directors.
Investments and exits.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has awarded a $950 million contract to five businesses for rapid research, development and prototyping of cyber capabilities. Companies awarded the “Agile Cyber Technology 3” contract include Assured Information Security, CNF Technologies, Global InfoTek, Invictus International Consulting and Radiance Technologies. AFRL program manager Tanya Macrina said of the contract, “Agile Cyber Technology 3 is the result of the combined success of both efforts, and an increasing demand signal from operational units to continue the rapid development, enhancement and fielding of cyber capabilities at the speed of need.”
Boston, Massachusetts-based SaaS buying platform Vendr has raised $150 million in Series B funding, co-led by Craft Ventures and new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with contributions from Sozo Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Sound Ventures, Tiger Global and Y Combinator. The company says that the funding will be used to “accelerate platform development, helping organizations cut costs, manage their second-highest expense - software - and reduce risk in light of the economic downturn.”
Cyber threat intelligence company Cyberint, headquartered in Tel Aviv, has raised $40 million in funding, led by StageOne Late Stage Arm, with participation from Neva SGR, Viola Growth, and existing investors. The company says the funding will be used to “accelerate Cyberint’s business growth, as well as to further develop and expand the company’s SaaS Threat Intelligence & Attack Surface Management platform known as Argos Edge,” and will “significantly bolster its global go-to-market efforts by expanding sales and marketing teams to capture even greater market share.”
Israeli cybersecurity startup Jit has raised $38.5 million in seed funding, led by Boldstart Ventures, with investments from Insight Partners and Tiger Global Management. The company says it will use the funding to “speed up product development and expand its integration and support for open source security controls.”
Application detection and response company RevealSecurity, based in Ramat Gan, Israel, has raised $23 million in Series A funding, led by SYN Ventures, with contributions from Hanaco Ventures, Silvertech Ventures and World Trade Ventures. CEO and co-founder of RevealSecurity, Doron Hendler, said, “The detection of insider threats in business processes has always been an unsolved challenge for enterprise CISOs and Risk Officers. RevealSecurity provides an insider threat solution for business processes that actually works with an unprecedented signal to noise ratio.”
Threat intelligence startup GreyNoise Intelligence, based in Washington, DC, has raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Radian Capital, with participation from CRV, Inner Loop, Stone Mill Ventures and Paladin Capital. GreyNoise says that they plan to use the funding to expand their “threat data collection capabilities and speed up go-to-market initiatives.”
French deep tech encryption firm Cosmian has raised €4.2 million, led by La Banque Postale with participation from previous investor Elaia Partners. The company plans to use the funds to expand its team. Cosmian CEO and co-founder Sandrine Murcia said, “Our offering is unique: we provide state-of-the-art advanced cryptography in the form of easy-to-use, decentralized developer tools. This new round of funding aims to increase our development capacity and to increase our traction in the market, with critical applications that are mostly deployed by unicorns.”
Firmware supply chain security company Binarly has raised $3.6 million in seed funding, led by Westwave Capital and Acrobator Ventures, with participation from Michael Sutton, Thomas 'Halvar Flake' Dullien, Jamie Butler, Ryan Permeh, Bryson Bort, Pedram Amini, Chris Ueland and David Mandel from Emerging Ventures. The company reports that it plans to use the funding to “speed up research and development initiatives, expand its world-class engineering team, and scale enterprise and device manufacturer adoption of its technologies.”
Automated application security testing company ShiftLeft, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, has announced an investment and go-to-market partnership with Wipro Ventures. Manish Gupta, CEO of ShiftLeft, said, “ShiftLeft makes it intuitive for Wipro’s hundreds of Cybersecurists and tens of thousands of software developers to build security into the DNA of every software release. With this new partnership with Wipro, customers from various sectors, including healthcare, industrials, manufacturing, retail, hospitality and government, will be able to deploy and operate ShiftLeft.”
Executive moves.
Stellar Cyber has hired Stephan Tallent as Worldwide Vice President, Service Providers and Stephen Salinas as Head of Product Marketing.
The NGO CyberPeace Institute has hired Vincent de Crayencour as Chief Business Development Officer.
Agora has appointed Roger Hale as the company’s Chief Security Officer.
Eclypsium has expanded its executive team, hiring Richard Wajsgras as President of Federal Sales and Global Channels & Alliances, Ariella Robison as Vice President of Marketing, Nate Warfield as Director of Threat Research and Intelligence, Mark Finke as Director of North America Sales, and Paul Asadoorian as Firmware Security Evangelist. The company also added Ramy Houssaini to its Strategic Advisory Board.
Interos has added Nita Kohli to the company’s Board of Advisors.
Aryaka has appointed Srini Addepalli as the company’s Chief Technology Officer.
BlueVoyant has appointed Barry Stern as Chief Financial Officer.
Netsurion has appointed John Addeo as Chief Revenue Officer.
Jscrambler has appointed Michael Grant as VP of Global Sales, and has promoted Carlos Rocha Gonçalves to VP of Growth and Filipe Pereira to VP of Engineering.
LogRhythm has appointed Mitzi Hunter as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer and Mike Dalgleish as the company’s VP of Sales, Americas.
SonarSource has hired Manish Gupta as Chief Marketing Officer. Gupta was formerly the Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM at Oracle.
NetSPI has appointed Steve Bakewell, Steve Armstrong, and Eric Graves to lead the company’s EMEA team and drive growth.
SilverSky has hired Mike Viruso as Vice President of Sales.
G Data CyberDefense has hired Matthias Koll as Business Owner of the Cyber Defense Academy.
AWS has named David Appel VP of National Security for the company.
Company news.
The Hindu reports that American cybersecurity company SentinelOne has opened an Indian office in Bengaluru. The company has plans to hire 500 people and invest $50 million to expand its Indian presence. Raj Rajamani, Chief Product Officer, SentinelOne, said, “The Indian market is ready to move beyond ineffective legacy antivirus, and there is a high demand for cutting edge cybersecurity technologies from Indian enterprises.”
Cloud data protection company Baffle, Inc. is launching a new engineering center in Bengaluru, Globe Newswire reports. Kumar Subramanian, senior director of engineering and head of India operations for the company, said, “Baffle’s new office creates a number of exciting hiring opportunities for local tech talent over the next year to help expand the company's Data Protection Platform in APAC’s Silicon Valley. The company’s decision to choose Bengaluru for this expansion highlights the rich pool of talent available in the area. This new facility will play a key part in extending Baffle’s global presence.”
Retrospect has announced Retrospect Cloud Storage, Retrospect Backup 19, and Retrospect Virtual 2022. Retrospect Cloud Storage provides offsite ransomware protection and detection for data, and the company explains that with Retrospect Backup 19 and Retrospect Virtual 2022, there is “complete support for immutable backups and anomaly detection.”
Norton and National PTA have enhanced their family-focused online safety tool ‘The Smart Talk.’ Updates include modifications from focus group feedback to make the tool available to people of all ages and diverse backgrounds, availability of the tool in Spanish, translated by native Spanish speakers, and changes for accessibility for neurodiverse users.
Moody’s Investors Service has released reports detailing the state of the cyber sector globally. Globally, cyberattack risk is on the rise, and rising claims are driving cyber insurers to raise their rates and narrow coverage as the conflict in Ukraine continues, one report documents. Another report highlights the growing shift companies are making to public cloud infrastructure and software providers, noting that the adoption of cloud infrastructure is driven by a need for operational and IT efficiencies, with the transfer of cybersecurity risk as “a positive side benefit.”