A Year (and a half) of Hunting - Funding News from Hunters’ CEO

18 months ago Tomer Kazaz and I founded Hunters.

Both of us started our Cyber journey with the Israeli Intelligence Corps, and we both had a unique opportunity to witness cybersecurity forming into what it is today: a chaotic and unpredictable realm, mostly dominated by criminals.

We set out to solve one of the biggest challenges organizations face today – detection and response to breaches in their networks. It’s asymmetric warfare. While organizations are collecting petabytes of telemetry about every activity in their network, cyber attackers are leveraging that to blend in the crowd and remain unfound.

At the front lines of this battle are SOC (Security Operation Center) teams worldwide. They are supported by an unprecedented number of security vendors who innovate one technology after the other. We met teams that had many cool, agile security technologies, but still couldn’t streamline threat detection and response. They had to assign skilled analysts to sift through all of the data and make the connections. With a staggering number of daily alerts and false-positives, the task was nearly impossible. Attacks were being missed. Breaches were in the making.

Our goal was to build an effective detection and response technology, both accurate and fast, that could make the connections across attack surfaces using telemetry and detections that existing tools generate. We wanted it to embed powerful analytics, our knowledge of attack techniques, and every relevant piece of data. We decided to build a detection technology that works for SOCs, instead of one that has the SOC working for it .

So we built Hunters.AI – the first autonomous threat hunting solution, to quickly find threats that bypass existing security controls, and deliver high confidence findings to SOC teams. The traces were already there, they just had to be found.

In the year passing from our seed funding, we grew our customer base to include companies like e.On, Snowflake, AppsFlyer, and TripActions; launched tech partnerships like the CrowdStrike Store and Snowflake Partner Connect, and more than doubled our team to build an impactful threat hunting technology that delivers new attack findings without additional staffing.

Today, I am happy to share that we raised another round of funding to expand the journey we embarked upon 18 months ago. We are lucky to have: M12 – Microsoft’s venture fund, US Venture Partners, and Okta Ventures joining Hunters' spaceship alongside our existing seed investors YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital. Here's the funding announcement.

In the meantime, I’d like to share with you three main areas of focus for us as we carry our journey forward:

• X-D-R: Trends come and go, true, but Extended Detection & Response – XDR reflects a big evolution in security efficacy across organizations. We believe it’s here to stay, in one form or another. At Hunters, we never intended to be an XDR, but we knew very early on that detection & response needs to be automated and it needs to look well beyond the endpoint to deliver accurate, timely findings to SOC. We will continue to enhance our best-of-breed XDR technology that provides organizations an intelligent connective tissue on top of their existing stack, and takes threat detection & response to its next level. It is an honor for us to be recognized by Gartner for that, and we will continue to partner with leading vendors to provide the most agile and seamless integrations.

• Tech Partnerships: As an agentless detection and response solution, Hunters.AI relies on integrations with best-of-breed security technologies. We are pleased to be working with leaders from all across endpoint, identity, network and cloud, and throughout 2020 -2021 we aim to expand our partnership ecosystem into new realms. Hunters provides unique added value by making the most of your current technology stack. We intend to keep it this way and make more use of your existing cybersecurity tools.
• Team Hunters!: Last but not least, the Hunters on the team. As mentioned, in the last year, Hunters more than doubled its size. In the next two years we are planning to grow the team even further by bringing in: extended go-to-market leadership in the US, more cyber experts to train the machine with new attack techniques on a daily basis, and more data scientists to boost its ML and further leverage data to train the machine. This, while maintaining and cultivating our company culture, with diversity as a key focus for success. If you are a female professional in the cybersecurity space, please contact us. We still have a lot to accomplish, and we want the best people by our side.

Stay tuned to hear more about our progress towards faster detection & response. Let’s go Hunting.