It’s against this backdrop that Evolution Equity Partners, a growth capital investment firm based in NYC, on Tuesday launched a $1.1 billion cybersecurity and AI fund, the third such fund in Evolution’s history.
The fund, called Evolution Technology Fund III, was oversubscribed, with participation from existing and new endowments, sovereign investors, insurance companies, foundations, fund of funds, family offices and angels.
“The Evolution Technology Fund III has already backed fifteen leading cybersecurity companies, initiating its investment period over 12 months ago,” Seewald said.
“We believe that provides private markets investors with diversified exposure to cybersecurity opportunities.”ESG will be another factor, according to Seewald.
Evolution’s 30-person teams manages around $2 billion in assets and has backed 60 companies to date; its previous fund was $400 million.
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA is warning Sisense customers to reset their credentials and secrets after the data analytics company reported a security incident.
CISA said it urges Sisense customers to “reset credentials and secrets potentially exposed to, or used to access, Sisense services” and to report any suspicious activity involving the use of compromised credentials to the agency.
Founded in 2004, Sisense develops business intelligence and data analytics software for big companies, including telcos, airlines and tech giants.
Companies like Sisense rely on using credentials, such as passwords and private keys, to access a customer’s various stores of data for analysis.
With access to these credentials, an attacker could potentially also access a customer’s data.
After leaving Nvidia in 2010, Kumar pivoted to cybersecurity, eventually co-founding Fortanix, a cloud data security platform.
Leveraging AI, Simbian can automatically orchestrate and operate existing security tools, finding the right configurations for each product by taking into account a company’s priorities and thresholds for security, informed by their business requirements.
A separate study found that organizations now juggle on average 76 different security tools, leading IT teams and leaders to feel overwhelmed.
In addition to automatically configuring a company’s security tools, the Simbian platform attempts to respond to “security events” by letting customers steer security while taking care of lower-level details.
But that assumes Simbian’s AI doesn’t make mistakes, a tall order, given that it’s well established that AI is error-prone.
Seven open source foundations are coming together to create common specifications and standards for Europe’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), regulation adopted by the European Parliament last month.
And this is what the seven open source foundations are coming together for now.
By coming together as one, this should go some way toward treating open source software development as a single “thing” bound by the same standards and processes.
Throw into the mix other proposed regulation, including the Securing Open Source Software Act in the U.S., and it’s clear that the various foundations and “open source stewards” will come under greater scrutiny for their role in the software supply chain.
“The open source community and the broader software industry now share a common challenge: legislation has introduced an urgent need for cybersecurity process standards.
Death, taxes, and regular, terrifying cybersecurity leaks.
Those are the facts of life, as the latest AT&T data breach is teaching us yet again.
A TechCrunch investigation into leaked customer data from the American telco giant has led to AT&T resetting certain customer account passcodes to prevent them from being at risk.
The root of the security weakness is a massive, and AT&T’s data breach included a leaked dataset concerning more than seventy million former and current AT&T account holders.
Only a fraction are still current, but the scale of the leaked dataset that TechCrunch dug into makes it plain that despite huge amounts of work and investment, there are still regular, exploitable, and dangerous for consumers.
Now, Coro — one of the startups building tools specifically for smaller businesses — is announcing a big round of funding after seeing its recurring revenues shoot up 300% in the last year.
Sources close to the deal tell TechCrunch that its valuation is over $750 million post-money.
And among SMBs responding to a survey from Digital Ocean, 74% named data privacy a top concern.
The opportunity in the security market for SMBs that Coro has identified is that these businesses typically lack the teams and internal IT budgets to dedicate to building and managing their defenses.
Its round last year, in April 2023, was $75 million at a $575 million valuation (also post-money).
StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round.
The startup serves over 50 clients across 17 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
One differentiator from its competitors in the cybersecurity industry is its unique expertise in Asia-related threats, Kevin Yoo, chief operating officer (COO) at StealthMole, told TechCrunch.
“The high demand for Asia-oriented threat information underscores the uniqueness and value of our dataset for customers worldwide, within and beyond Asia,” Yoo said.
Korea Investment Partners led the Series A round with participation from Hibiscus Fund (a joint venture between RHL Ventures, Penjana Kapital and KB Investment) and Smilegate Investment.
Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity.
But what sets Avalor apart is the ability to handle data from virtually any source in any format, and its unique set of vulnerability risk management and prioritization tools.
Prior to the Zscaler acquisition, Avalor managed to secure $30 million from investors including TCV, Salesforce Ventures, Jibe Ventures and Cyberstarts.
And Raz sees Zscaler taking the business — and its ~80-person team spread across the U.S. and Israel — further.
As Crunchbase’s Chris Metinko noted earlier today, Zscaler’s acquisition — along with others in the cybersecurity space — could help spark activity in a slow-to-stagnant cyber M&A market.
Well, if you ask Garrett Hamilton, they should give Reach Security a whirl.
Instead of serving as just another layer in a company’s cybersecurity stack, Reach connects to a company’s existing IT and security products, collecting data on attacks and recommending ways to combat them using security tools that the company already owns.
They’re wrong.”Prior to Reach, Hamilton worked at Palo Alto Networks, where he was director of product management.
A survey from security posture management vendor Panaseer found that organizations manage on average between 64 to 76 security tools (as of 2022).
Reach also auto-tunes security tool configurations to try to prevent attacks, prioritizing actions based on how the attacks are being carried out.
Paris-based cybersecurity startup Filigran is capitalizing on the success of OpenCTI to build a suite of open-source threat management products.
The company has already found some early traction with OpenCTI, its open-source threat intelligence platform.
It’s a threat intelligence platform that lets you gather threat data from multiple sources in a single interface.
OpenBAS can be used as a standalone product, but it works better if you’re already using OpenCTI as it can use the threat intelligence data in OpenCTI.
There will be another two products in Filigran’s eXtended Threat Management (XTM) product suite that focus on data-driven risk analysis and crisis management.
