Cybersecurity startup Safe Security (earlier ) raised $33m in a funding round led by London-based British Telecom (BT), bringing the total amount raised to $49.2m.
Its existing investors, including former Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems John Chambers, also participated in the round.
As a part of the investment, BT will be granted the exclusive rights to use and sell Safe Security products to organisations in the UK as it incorporates the platform into its wider portfolio. BT will also work with Safe Security to develop new products and with Safe’s customers to improve their cybersecurity postures. The investment will also allow BT to combine Safe’s platform with its managed security services to offer customers a real-time view of how safe the customers are.
Founded by Saket Modi, Vidit Baxi and Rahul Tyagi, Safe Security, with its Security Assessment Framework for Enterprises (SAFE) platform, allows organisations to check their defences and understand the likelihood of suffering a major cyberattack. It calculates a financial cost to customers’ risks and provides actionable insight on the steps that can be taken to address them. The solution, which is used by a number of companies, including Facebook, Softbank and Xiaomi, mitigates enterprise-wide cyber risk in real-time using its machine learning-enabled application programming interface-first SAFE platform.
Commenting on the plans ahead, Modi said, “We have more than 200 people spread across the globe today and plan to double our engineering team to over 200 engineers, while the total headcount will grow to over 300 by the end of the financial year.”
While Safe Security competes with companies such as UpGuard, Exabeam and VisibleRisk, it has continued to attract clients. “In the last financial year, our revenue grew by 270%, and we plan to beat that number in this financial year. Our revenue from the US is expected to grow sixfold in the next 12 months,” Modi said.
With the frequency of large-scale data breaches increasing — from 662 in 2010 to over 1,000 by 2020 — businesses are looking for ways to assess how vulnerable they might be. The cost of cybercrime is estimated to have reached just under $1tn in 2020 as criminals exploited the pandemic to target enterprises.
BT chief executive officer Philip Jansen added, “Cybersecurity is now at the top of the agenda for businesses and governments, who need to be able to trust that they are protected against increasing levels of attack. Adding SAFE to BT’s proactive, predictive security services will give customers an enhanced view of their threat level and rapidly pinpoint specific actions needed to strengthen their defences. Already one of the world’s leading providers in a highly fragmented security market, this investment is a clear sign of BT’s ambition to grow further.”
Backed by John Chambers and senior executives from Softbank, Sequoia, PayPal, SAP, and McKinsey & Co, Safe has been working with MIT in joint research for the development of its SAFE scoring algorithm since 2018.
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