Cyr3con, an artificial intelligence powered cybersecurity startup, has closed $1.5M in seed funding.
The oversubscribed round was led by New York-based Scout Ventures, with participation from several notable angel investors who are advising the company. These include Michael Sutton (former CISO, Zscaler), Aleksandr Yampolskiy (CEO, SecurityScorecard), Steven Witt (former CEO, Onyara and Partner/Co-Founder of DataTribe), and Steve Hassell, (former CIO, Emerson).
In conjunction with the funding, Scout Ventures partner Wes Blackwell will also be joining Cyr3con’s board.
Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, CYR3CON combines artificial intelligence and information from malicious hacking communities to predict cyberattacks. Its solution automatically scouts the hacker communities and uses machine learning to help prioritize vulnerabilities that hackers most intend to use in an attack.
“At Scout we look for seed stage startups that use AI in creative ways. CYR3CON exemplifies this,” said Blackwell. “Their unique combination of AI with automatically extracted hacker conversations is shifting clients from a reactive to a proactive security posture.”
Originally funded by grant funding from the U.S. government, the company gained notoriety with predictions concerning several major attacks – including WannaCry and NotPetya, and gained recent traction with multiple Fortune 500 enterprises as well as cybersecurity service providers (such as MSSP’s).
Scout Ventures’ portfolio also includes ID.me, a user-centric digital identity network that empowers consumers to prove who they are and things about themselves that are true in real-time while they are online.
In the FinTech space, Scont has also previously backed mobile commerce network platform BuyFi and crowdfunding platform SeedInvest.
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