CardinalOps, the threat coverage optimization company, announced today that it has secured $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Viola Ventures, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, Glilot Capital, and Symbol. Danny Cohen, a general partner at Viola Ventures, will be joining the CardinalOps Board of Directors, while  Phil Neray of Microsoft has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Cyber Defense Strategy.

The global threat landscape for SIEM and XDRs is continuously changing. This change, combined with a massive increase in log data from diverse sources, be it endpoint, cloud, or identity, is driving exponential growth in complexity for Security Operations Center (SOC) teams. So much so that more than 80 percent of security professionals rate the complexity of their SOC as very high. The leading consequence of this complexity is the increased risk of a breach due to backlogs and human errors in manually developing new threat detection rules and queries. Moreover, less than 40 percent assess their SOC as highly effective. If SOC teams are admitting to doubts about the effectiveness of their systems, you know there's a problem.

Using AI-based analytics to drive security infrastructure effectiveness and efficiency

The Israeli startup CardinalOps is helping organizations leverage analytics to scale and optimize their cyber defences in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber adversaries worldwide. Powered by machine learning, they can identify and remediate gaps in threat detection coverage for existing SIEM/XDRs. CardinalOps’ platform can be applicable for a medley of different industries, like manufacturing, financial services, hospitality, media, transportation & logistics, law firms, and managed security services. They deliver AI-powered recommendations in the native query language of widely used security analytics solutions such as Splunk, Sentinel, IBM QRadar, and CrowdStrike; all recommendations are mapped to standard MITRE ATT&CK threat models, customized according to the organization’s risk-based priorities and infrastructure, and automatically deployed to rapidly eliminate gaps in threat coverage. Essentially, CardinalOps' platform can make detections that a skilled engineer with years of experience could do, but faster and without the risk of human error.

With the new capital raised, CardinalOps plans to continue to expand into global go-to-market and product innovation activities to extend their threat coverage optimization for widely used but under-utilized security tools. CardinalOps was founded in early 2020 by Michael Mumcuoglu (CEO) and Yair Manor (CTO). The company’s advisory board includes industry experts Anton Chuvakin, Dan Burns, and Randy Watkins. CardinalOps has raised a total of $24 million to date.