At a glance.
- ZeroFox acquiring LookingGlass.
- ID.me raises $132 million in funding.
- Executive moves.
- Company news.
- Labor markets.
Mergers and acquisitions.
ZeroFox Monday announced the entering of a definitive agreement to acquire external attack surface management and threat intelligence company LookingGlass Cyber Solutions. “The acquisition of LookingGlass is a natural extension of our strategy to provide our customers with a single end-to-end platform for protecting their external attack surface from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks,” said James C. Foster, Chairman and chief executive of ZeroFox. “We are bringing together passionate teams that have been partners for years, and proven world-class capabilities across attack surface management, digital risk protection, threat intelligence and breach response to continue our leadership in external cybersecurity.”
California’s Identity Data Fabric company, Radiant Logic, has announced the acquisition of Brainwave GRC, an identity analytics provider. The combined companies plan to offer an identity data platform that combines data federation and observability with analytics and capabilities. “We have co-exhibited at a few major conferences recently, and the interest from the market and from our customers has been very exciting,” said Joe Sander, Radiant Logic chief executive. “Practitioners see the opportunity to use analytics to mitigate access related risks and significantly improve their identity data governance practices with the joint solution.”
Allurity, a European cyber security provider has finalized the acquisition of Portuguese company CloudComputing, as well as Swiss company Securix. The acquisition will leave both companies' brands the same, however, they will become part of a decentralized structure. Pressat reports that this gives Allurity a boost in its growth in what are identified as key markets.
Cybersecurity cloud company Akamai Technologies has announced its entrance into a definitive agreement for the acquisition of API detection and response platform, Neosec. Neosec’s existing capabilities are said to extend the visibility of Akamai’s current application and portfolio further into the threat landscape.
Cybersecurity and privacy investment firm NightDragon, based in San Francisco, California, has acquired cybersecurity business application behavioral monitoring company vArmour. "The opportunity is bigger than ever before for leading vendors that can stand side by side with security leaders to help them advance their cloud application securities practices and combat rising risk. NightDragon is excited to deepen our relationship with vArmour to take full advantage of the market opportunity in front of us and help organizations everywhere build security and operational resilience from the ground up," said Dave DeWalt, Founder and CEO of NightDragon.
Investments and exits.
Finovate reports that Virginia-based digital identity network ID.me has closed a $132 million funding round, led by Viking Global Investors, with investments from CapitalG, Morgan Stanley Counterpoint, FTV Capital, PSP Growth, Auctus Investment Group, Moonshots Capital, and Scout Ventures. The intended use for the funds has not yet been specified, but the total funding for the company now sits at $240 million.
Coro, a New York-based mid-market cybersecurity platform has announced a funding round of $75 million, adding Energy Impact Partners to its list of current investors, and bringing the company's total funding in the last year to $155 million. “The additional funding is a validation that Coro’s disruption of the cybersecurity industry is succeeding,” said Guy Moskowitz, CEO, Coro.
AI-based cyber risk management platform provider Safe Security has announced the closure of a $50 million Series B round, the company reports. The round was led by Sorenson Capital, with participation from Fidelity’s Eight Roads, Telstra Ventures, WTI, among existing investors. The Palo Alto, California company's total funding now sits at over $100 million. "Managing cyber risk is at a critical inflection point. There is a huge market opportunity for a horizontal layer across the entire cyber stack for managing risk," said Burke Davis, partner at Sorenson Capital. "We invested in Safe because it is uniquely positioned to assume this leadership role in this new category with its real-time AI-driven approach."
Seattle-based adversary-focused cybersecurity provider SpecterOps has raised $25 million in Series A funding, led by Decibel. The funding is intended for use for acceleration of adoption of the company’s platform BloodHound Enterprise (BHE), as well as the expansion of company research and development.
Spanish digital identity and biometrics company Veridas has announced the raise of €15 million in capital increase from its own partners, and is now positioning themselves as a global identity company, providing solutions for both digital and physical space identity management.
Automated data security platform and governance solution provider Dasera has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Storm Ventures, with participation from Correlation Ventures, Mighty Capital, Tau Ventures, Intuitive Cloud, and existing investors. The funding will be used for product development, expansion of market presence, and improved customer support.
Cyfirma, a Singapore-based threat intelligence and attack surface management company, has raised $6 million in a pre-Series B funding round, led by Israel’s OurCrowd fund and Larsen & Toubro’s L&T Innovation Fund, Security Week reports. The funding is intended for use in advancing the company's platform, and expanding into new regions, like North America, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Mobb, a Boston-based company coined the “automatic vulnerability fixer,” has raised $5.4 million in seed funding, the company reports. This funding round was led by an angel investor, Ariel Maislos, and saw participation from Cyber club, London amongst others. “The application security market has been desperate for innovation that doesn’t just detect problems, but fixes them. I invested in Mobb so its talented founding team could build technology that lifts the burden of vulnerability remediation and help organizations achieve secure innovation,” said Maislos.
Executive moves.
Fenix24 has appointed Marlo Polunic as a managing director.
HUB Security has named David Riker as the company’s global chief operating officer.
Apollo has named Jennifer Gold as the company’s new head of threat intelligence.
Theodore Mugnier has been named director of information security at Cenlar.
Sentra has welcomed Shaun Marion to its advisory board.
6clicks has named John Meacock as the company’s new chairman of the board.
Joe Murray has been promoted to SVP of partnerships at Netacea.
Styra has named Mark Pundsack as its chief executive.
Suresh Sathyamurthy has taken on a new position as chief marketing officer at Akeyless Security.
Contrast Security has a new CEO, Rick Fitz.
Yamini Rangan has been named to Splunk’s board of directors.
Gigamon has promoted Kristi Thiele to VP of worldwide sales engineering.
Charles Carmakal has been welcomed onto Marlinspike’s advisory board.
SentinelOne has named Sally Jenkins as the company’s new chief marketing officer.
Company news.
This past Saturday, MIT’s Sloan School of Management in partnership with Harvard Business School hosted their Technology and National Security Conference; the second-ever event of its kind and the first to be held at MIT. The conference honed in on challenges, opportunities, and emerging dynamics within global defense. Centered around technology and innovation, this year’s conference honed in on the hybrid war between Russia and Ukraine, and its implications for China and Taiwan. The conference included not only a cybersecurity panel, but an Innovation Showcase displaying the work of a multitude of players in the cyber and defense sectors.
Discussed in the cyber panel was the importance of public and private partnership with governmental organizations, as well as the need for talent within the cybersecurity sector, and how the National Cybersecurity Strategy (among other governmental reports) is attempting to help build up the talent within the industry. Cybersecurity is manageable if resources and skills are readily available and accessible, however that has not proven to be the case in many instances. The panelists noted that the recently-released National Cybersecurity Strategy, attempts to shift the responsibility of remaining cybersecure onto bigger players. Cloud service providers, larger technology companies, and major cybersecurity companies have a better infrastructure capable of managing these threats, rather than small businesses alone and individuals.
The conference also included an Innovation Showcase, demonstrating the work of 13 seed through Series A-stage defense startups. The showcase contained two parts: a set of lightning-round pitches from four finalists, and an innovation sandbox to meet with the startups doing groundbreaking work in their respective fields. Lightning round pitch finalists included:
- Adyton Public Benefit Corporation, a startup specializing in Zero Trust defense for military capabilities
- Greynoise, a cyber company specializing in scanning Internet traffic and filtering through the noise to alerting to relevant, potential events of mass exploitation of vulnerabilities
- Reach Security, a company working in enterprise security posture management to aid in maximizing the capabilities of existing company cyber infrastructure
- True Anomaly, a company working to provide security and sustainability solutions in the space domain with mission-driven technologies
As well as the Innovation Showcase finalists, which included:
- ANOVA Intelligence, a defense contractor providing mission-critical advanced persistent threat (APT) defense,
- Distributed Spectrum, a company providing a spectrum monitoring system for critical situational awareness,
- Mach Industries, who’s developing uses for hydrogen for better effects on guns and aerial systems,
- Pison Technology, a startup specializing in electroneurography to translate data generated by the body's natural physiological electricity into machine interpretable events,
- Reality Defender, a deepfake detection platform to fight against fraudulent users and content,
- Stitch3D, a cloud-based 3D data management platform accessible from any device,
- Team Cymru, a cyber threat intelligence and attack surface management provider,
- Themis AI, a startup aiming to remove bias within machine learning pipelines,
- Unstructured Technologies, a startup aiming to address the preprocessing bottleneck in using AI and machine learning against unstructured data.
Labor markets.
BankInfoSecurity reports this week that application security vendor Snyk will be seeing a third round of layoffs taking place since June of last year. The company plans to reduce its staff further by 11%, on the heels of laying off 198 people less than six months ago. Cuts will primarily impact go-to-market and corporate functions, the outlet reports.