Hunters.AI, the pioneer in autonomous threat hunting, today announced $5.4M in seed funding for its mission to accelerate cyber threat response and fight cybercrime by helping organizations detect, identify and remediate sophisticated cyberattacks targeting their cloud, hybrid and enterprise environments. The round was led by YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital.
CISOs and their teams face determined attackers who are continuously inventing new tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to bypass existing security defenses. Security teams rely on many disparate tools with the hope of finding and responding to attacks. Despite collecting huge volumes of data from applications, network, endpoints as well as management, monitoring and security tools, organizations struggle through this massive fog of data and alerts to identify what matters most.
The Hunters’ autonomous hunting solution finds the breadcrumbs that are always left behind by attackers, but that remain hidden to security defenses. It then connects those digital traces to quickly identify and isolate attacks, and provide high fidelity and contextual attack stories, dramatically accelerating cyber threat detection and response time. Hunters’ solution deployment does not require introducing new agents or scanners into the environment nor duplicating existing data.
An early customer, Mario Duarte, vice president of Security at Snowflake Computing, a cloud data warehouse company, experienced firsthand the speed and effectiveness of Hunters. In a recent Red Team attack exercise, they created the worst-case scenario—they gave the attackers credentials for a user account with elevated admin privileges, an internal company laptop and the element of surprise.
“The result was amazing. Hunters identified the attack in minutes, alerted our team and they resolved it. While that might sound easy, it is not. If an attacker has credentials and access to a compromised company device, traditional monitoring systems cannot tell the difference from a legitimate employee and an attacker. But Hunters autonomous hunting technology did find it. In my 20 years in security, I have not seen anything as effective, fast and with high fidelity as what Hunters can do,” said Duarte.
Hunters is led by CEO Uri May and CTO Tomer Kazaz and was co-founded and incubated by Chairman Ehud Schneorson, Yodfat Harel Buchris and Idan Nurick. The team they have assembled understands how attackers think, behave and act, and combines that knowledge with technical, hands-on threat hunting experience.
“From the start, we recognized that companies need access to more expertise and knowledge about attacks and attackers in order to defend themselves,” said Hunters Chairman Ehud Schneorson, retired brigadier general and former commander of Unit 8200 in the Israel Defense Forces and venture partner at Blumberg Capital. “That is why we partnered with Hunters founders Uri May and Tomer Kazaz to deliver this expertise and build the industry’s first autonomous hunting solution that enables companies to continuously hunt and respond to attacks in a way no other solution does.”
“IT security teams must become faster and better at detecting and stopping attacks, and threat hunting is the obvious strategy of choice. But hiring the highly specialized and in-demand skills and knowledge needed is simply not possible,” said Ofer Schreiber, partner at YL Ventures. “This leaves an attack detection gap and the cost of failure is a board level concern. Deploying Hunters is like putting an army of highly skilled threat hunters to work to magnify your team’s power and close that gap.”
“Our solution helps security teams to get the most out of their existing tools and gain unprecedented insight into attacks as they unfold in their cloud, hybrid and enterprise environments.” says Hunters Co-Founder and CEO Uri May. “The only way to deal with velocity and volume of attacks is to leverage world-class expertise in an automated fashion that can be trained and adapts itself to the ever-changing attack surface.”
The Hunters solution is currently in limited availability to qualified customers. General availability will be available in late 2019. For more information, visit Hunters.AI
About Hunters.AI
Hunters.AI is the industry’s first Autonomous Hunting solution. Hunters combines its unique Attack Intelligence, Hunting AI and Continuous Automation with the enterprise’s existing security data to transform enterprise threat hunting from hunt and hope to hunting that works. Hunters.AI generates and delivers actionable visualized attack stories allowing organizations to more quickly and effectively identify, understand and respond to attacks.
About YL Ventures
YL Ventures funds and supports brilliant Israeli tech entrepreneurs from seed to lead. Based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, YL Ventures manages $140 million and specializes in cybersecurity. YL Ventures accelerates the evolution of portfolio companies via strategic advice and U.S.-based operational execution, leveraging a powerful network of Chief Information Security Officers and global industry leaders. The firm’s track record includes successful, high-profile portfolio company acquisitions by major corporations including Microsoft, CA and Proofpoint.
About Blumberg Capital
Blumberg Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with passionate entrepreneurs to innovate and build successful technology companies. The firm specializes in leading Seed and Series A rounds collaborating with angel investors, other venture capital firms and strategic partners. The Blumberg Capital team are active investors and board members – operating as an extension of the entrepreneurs’ network. Blumberg Capital is headquartered in San Francisco with team members in Tel Aviv and New York. For more information, please visit blumbergcapital.com.