Today’s modern landscape demands and encourages enterprises to enrich their market presence, improve their technology, and better support customers by forming technological-based partnerships with third-party solutions. However, this oftentimes leaves your organization exposed, as you can’t monitor your enterprise’s ever-expanding ecosystem.
Israeli startup Cyberpion developed a system that secures all organizational assets, as well as the outbound network linked to your organization, and has been operating in a bootstrap format for 4 years now. However, all things come to an end, and the company announced the completion of an $8.25 million Seed funding round. The investment was led Team8 Capital and Hyperwise Ventures.
Started with financial protection, until it discovered a much larger problem
Cyberpion’s SaaS platform is operationally ready and doesn’t require prior installation, settings configuration or various adjustments, and is immediately let loose to hunt and defuse cyber-threats derived from third-party solutions. In addition, the system also locates all organizational assets both known and unknown. The system performs continuous security assessments of network vulnerabilities before the hackers do it for you, and then flag the weakness in real-time with actionable insight on how to fix these network vulnerabilities.
In a conversation with Geektime, CEO and co-founder Dr. Nethanel Gelernter explains that from its initial threat analysis done on major multinational banks, the company actually found that it’s possible to hack assets of over 60% of the banks. After completing the research, the company discovered that it was a widespread, recurring issue that impacts almost all sectors. This led the company to sort of pivot from the financial realm and offer network security to all markets. “We discovered attacks that can take over the front page of major newspapers, as well as attacks on some of the biggest retail companies. From energy companies, major airlines, to governments, and even some of the market leaders in security, all suffer from the same exact weakness, with similar statistics,” reveals Gelernter.
COVID accelerates yet another solution
As mentioned, for the past 4 years the company was bootstrapped without investors, and this latest investment marks the first-ever for the cyber company (except for a SAFE investment closed prior to the funding round). Gelernter explains that the company used its revenue to keep balanced and even experience growth over the past 4 years. However, with the Coronavirus outbreak creating fertile ground for hackers, things needed to change: “During COVID reality, our system detected thousands of new attacks and we needed the extra resources to take advantage of the situation. The quality and experience of Team8 and Hyperwise VC, along with the opportunity to use the funds to accelerate growth made the decision of fundraising an easy one. We will utilize the funds to expand our marketing and sales efforts in the U.S. and accelerate R&D around the security ecosystem.”
Cyberpion was founded in 2016 by CEO Dr. Nethanel Gelernter and VP R&D Ori Engelberg, who are cousins. Early on the duo also added CBO Ran Nahmias as co-founder. Nahmias previously headed global cloud security at Check Point, was senior executive at Aqua Security, and Director of enterprise strategy at Microsoft.
