On EQT Ventures’ investment in Qevlar AI, the tool to fight smarter cyber criminals
At EQT Ventures, we are privileged to have access to a close-knit group of cybersecurity professionals from industries and companies across the globe.
In the last year, we’ve kept our eyes and ears wide open. And, unsurprisingly, we learned that the intersection of AI and security has become increasingly critical, as organisations grapple with the ever-changing threat landscape. The rise of LLMs and novel AI technologies has brought new scale and complexity to some of the most pressing challenges faced by CISO teams.
One of the most recurring themes has been the challenges faced by Security Operations Center (SOC) teams, and their trilemma:
- Cyber threats have grown in complexity due to developments in AI.
- Current cybersecurity tools (mainly SIEM systems) are not adapted to handle the unprecedented surge in logs, leading to alert fatigue.
- There is a talent and skill shortage creating more pressure on SOC teams.
Imagine a platform tailored for CISOs and SOC teams, seamlessly integrated into customers’ environments, capable of swiftly pre-qualifying incoming alerts in under 30 seconds, as opposed to the 20 minutes typically required by a human analyst. Such a solution would alleviate the burdens on analysts, diminish the risk of human error, and empower faster and more effective responses.
Meet Qevlar: a cybersecurity AI solution designed to improve and automate the process of Security Operations Centers.
With this context in mind, we jumped on the opportunity to meet the Qevlar team, when our friend Mehdi offered the introduction.
Qevlar AI autonomously investigates alerts generated by your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system, eliminating the need for manual playbook creation. Within seconds, it transforms a security alert into a comprehensive report, providing a swift means to ascertain whether the alert indicates a genuine security incident or merely a false alarm.
We’ve been excited by:
- The team: from our first interactions, we’ve been impressed by the team’s relentless work ethic and ambition, and how customer-focused they were whilst also being a highly technical team. Ahmed and Hamza have known each other for years, and spent their weekends beating the security team of a leading global telecommunications company during security hackathons.
- The timing: while they’re coming out of stealth today, they have acquired substantial contracts rapidly. The feedback from our CISO community has been unprecedented and unanimous: “If they solve that, everyone will want to buy it”.
- The unique positioning of the product: Qevlar takes a radically different approach compared to incumbents who primarily leverage LLMs for developing user-friendly interfaces, without fully tapping into core automation. It aspires to function as a full SOC team member, essentially serving as the automated SOC level 1 analyst within an organisation.
It’s always exciting to find a team that has built the right product at the right time. Qevlar is providing the right technological capabilities to buyers ready to open up their check books.
We believe that by being the first to provide tech-agnostic, non-deterministic, explainable AI-powered SOC automations, Qevlar is spearheading a new paradigm in the SOC market.
Today, we’re proud to be leading their USD 5m round, bringing on the cap table an experienced list of founders and operators like Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku, Mehdi Ghissassi, Director of Product at Google DeepMind, Edouard Viot, VP Product of GitGuardian, Tarik Dadi, CEO of Qantev, and Roland de La Chapelle.
A warm welcome to Ahmed, Hamza, and the entire Qevlar team to EQT Ventures!
Qevlar is currently hiring for a broad range of roles — click here if you’re curious about joining as an early team member of one of the hottest cybersec companies in the world.
At EQT Ventures, we are actively investing in cybersecurity, AI, and the intersection of the two. If you are building, please reach out to julien.hobeika@eqtventures.com.
