Balbix, a San Jose, California-based company using AI to prevent high-profile cybersecurity disasters, has raised $20m.
The Series B funding was led by Singtel Innov8, the corporate venture fund of the Singtel Group, and Mubadala Ventures, the venture arm of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company. Existing Balbix investor Mayfield Fund also took part alongside angels including ex-Cisco CEO John Chambers, former Cisco EVP Pankaj Patel and entrepreneurs BV Jagadeesh and Gary Gauba.
In conjunction with the funding, Balbix has expanded its board of directors with the appointments of Patel, Gauba and Jeff Karras, managing director of Singtel Innov8.
“Balbix is taking a game-changing approach to address the most fundamental cybersecurity challenges of today, including the ever-increasing volume and complexity of major breaches,” said John Chambers, founder and CEO of purpose-driven firm JC2 Ventures and chairman emeritus of Cisco Systems.
“Cybersecurity threats are evolving faster than we could have ever imagined, and Balbix is a true leader in the space with their innovative approach to improving cyber-resilience. The company’s potential impact on the market is exponential and I look forward to supporting Balbix as they strive to digitally secure businesses, governments and citizens alike.”
The company, launched out of a stealth a year ago, uses deep learning and other advanced AI algorithms to continuously gather and analyse data about an enterprise’s massive attack surface. It produces relevant insights for different stakeholders and claims to predict where and how breaches are likely to happen (before attacks start). It also provides specific prescriptions and workflow support to improve security posture, develop cyber-resilience, and avoid breaches.
By forecasting critical breach scenarios and prioritising/recommending fixes by business risk, the company aims to improve security operations, compliance and cyber-resilience.
Earlier this year, cybersecurity platform Attivo Networks received a new strategic investment from Singtel Innov8. Attivo uses deception technology for real-time detection, analysis, and accelerated response to advanced, credential, insider, and ransomware cyber-attacks. The platform is able to detect in-network threats and provides threat management for user networks, data centres, cloud, IoT, ICS-SCADA, and POS environments.
Singtel Innov8 also recently took part in Silverfort’s $11.5m in Series A funding round. Founded in 2016, Silverfort provides an AI-based policy platform, which enables adaptive multi-factor authentication across entire networks and cloud environments. This includes systems that don’t support multi-factor authentication today, such as proprietary systems, IoT devices, shared files and folders, industrial control systems (ICS) and more.
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
