Today (Tuesday) Hunters, an Israeli startup that provides organizations with an AI-backed cyber-threat hunting solution, announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Microsoft’s VC fund, M12, and U.S. Venture Partners, with other participating investors including Okta. YL Ventures, and Blumberg Capital - which also invested at Seed level. This is yet further proof to Microsoft’s strong trust in the Israeli cyber market as M12 was recently involved in an investment round in Israeli startup Authomize.

Actively hunting threats

Hunters developed a system that connects itself into an organization’s preexisting data sources that are covered by various security solutions like firewalls, cloud security, endpoint, and others. In addition, the system also scours the cloud storage, and SaaS services subscribed to by organizations, for threats. The system tracks cyber-attacks throughout the raw data sources looking for even the faintest trace of cyber-threat and contains it.

Then the machine-learning-based system encrypts the traces which were detected and prioritizes them based on threat-level. Next, the system sends a report to the organization’s SOC team detailing the incident and including a comprehensive break-down of the attack: time, paths, targets, context, effect, and more - so that the SOC team can contain and research the threat as quickly as possible.

The name of the game is in the Israeli startup’s name, Threat Hunting. This is the company’s philosophy, meaning the organization’s network is constantly under attack, therefore the system actively “hunts” for threats rather than settling for passive defenses. The company claims that its product can actually detect attacks that more conventional cyber-security products tend to miss. The process includes automatic detection of various attack techniques and crossing them inside an organization’s controlled IT environment.

Hunters CEO, Uri May told Geektime that “our machine-learning system was developed to detect all types of cyber-attacks with pinpoint precision and speed.” May continues to add that “compared to other detection, response, and analytics solutions on the market, our product knows how to trace attacks that are missed by other technologies while also providing SOC teams with complete detail of the incident. The system’s connection to organizational data sources and its automation feature allows for quick and accurate containment of any possible threat.”  

May, who co-founded the company along with CTO Tomer Kazaz in 2018, also noted that the “Series A investment serves as testimony to our advancement on the technological side, ML and threat interrogation, as well as our commercial collaboration with the cyber market.” The cyber-startup has raised a total of $20.4 million up-to-date.