Cyware lands $30M to modernize cybersecurity operations

Cyware, a startup developing products to help enterprises modernize their security operations, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by Ten Eleven Ventures. Advent International, Zscaler, Emerald Development Managers, Prelude and Great Road Holdings also participated, bringing Cyware’s total raised to $73 million.

Cyware was founded in 2016 by Anuj Goel and Akshat Jain. Goel previously led efforts to research and implement ways to overcome silos within large security teams at companies including Citi. Jain came from Big Tech companies like Oracle and Adobe, where he specialized in building distributed systems.

With Cyware, Goel and Jain say that they saw an opportunity to integrate threat intelligence with threat hunting, vulnerability and incident data through prebuilt workflows.

“An effective and proactive security posture relies on a multidimensional approach,” Goel told TechCrunch in an email interview. “When it comes to proactive threat response, it’s critical to connect the dots and quickly respond to a suspicious attack. The more accurate and faster the response to a threat, the less of an impact it has on an organization.”

So where does Cyware come in?

As Goel describes it, Cyware’s platform offers both no-code and low-code capabilities designed to help security teams automate their various threat-combatting applications. Via collaboration components, teams can share threat intelligence in real time — with any luck, heading off attacks before they wreak havoc. .

Extending the collaborative element, Cyware hosts a network that connects enterprise security teams with each other and with third-party threat data providers. This, Goel says, allows teams to receive threat intel, such as information about vulnerabilities, directly from security vendors, software providers and vetted tech companies.

On trend, Cyware uses AI to extract information from threat intelligence data, score the severity of threats and cluster similar threats together — ultimately combining all the data to generate a report with ky insights. Cyware’s AI also provides code suggestions for security orchestration and generates detection rules and signatures that can be dropped into existing threat detection systems.

“Our solutions are built to handle volume and scale, enabling large security teams to effectively operationalize actionable threat intelligence while automating response actions without compromising on performance and speed,” Goel said.

Cyware, which has over 200 employees, doesn’t plan to grow its headcount anytime soon. Goel stressed that this isn’t cause for alarm, pointing to a growing customer base that spans Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies and regulatory bodies.

The fundraising is a testament to Cyware’s strength in a relatively week market. According to Crunchbase, in the first quarter of 2023, cybersecurity venture capital funding dropped 58% year-over-year while deal flow dropped to 149 deals — the lowest total in years and a 45% drop from Q1 2022.

“Cyware’s platform is designed to reduce repetitive tasks for threat intel and security operations analysts, automate taking intelligent actions to proactively prevent attacks and deliver the right information to the right people at the right time,” he said. “CISOs and other C-suite managers benefit from consolidated dashboards and reports of threats, incidents and response actions, as well as the ability to action information quickly.”

Goel says that the proceeds from the Series C will be put toward expanding Cyware’s go-to-market efforts, market presence, channel business and strategic partnerships.