Our Investment in CyCognito — The Cybersecurity Platform That Thinks Like a Hacker
We are thrilled to share that today our portfolio company CyCognito has announced it has raised $23 million in funding, less than two years after we wrote the first pre-seed check. CyCognito’s next-generation platform addresses a fundamental security gap — shadow risk — that represents a $50 billion market in the US alone. CyCognito’s A round was led by Arif Janmohamed at Lightspeed with continued participation from seed investors UpWest, Sorenson Capital, Dan Scheinman and others.
We first heard about Rob and Dima from our founder network in Israel. We had met Dima before in a previous venture of his, and Rob attracted our attention after he became the youngest CTO of the product department within the 8200 unit. We were drawn to their knowledge of the security market and vision to harness the power of state-of-the-art cyber reconnaissance techniques to help enterprises prevent cybercriminals, organized crime and other sophisticated attackers from breaching these increasingly digital organizations.
After we made our initial investment, Rob relocated to Palo Alto to begin customer engagement with US brands and enterprises. Very quickly he won over some of the closest advisors and early investors in our immediate network, including angel investor Dan Scheinman, SentinelOne founder & CEO Tomer Weingarten, Trusona founder & CEO Ori Eisen, and others. Rob We later introduced Rob to both his Seed round lead (Sorenson) and Series A round lead (Lightspeed).
The CyCognito Platform — How it works
Hackers and security attackers need just a single point of entry to wreak havoc on an organization and even related outside organizations, but legacy security approaches are completely inadequate for monitoring all connected ecosystems and conduits. As organizations have transformed from operating with a well-defined perimeter to building hyperconnected, fluid IT ecosystems that span on-premises, cloud, partner and subsidiary environments, it’s nearly impossible for solutions built 20+ years ago to keep up.
Already in early use by global financial, healthcare and hospitality organizations, the cloud-based CyCognito platform discovers and prioritizes exposed IT assets and risks that elude other solutions, but are visible to attackers. That helps organizations focus their security resources on those formerly “unknown unknowns” before attackers exploit the gaps.
CyCognito continuously analyzes 3.5 billion internet-exposed assets, and has mapped those to thousands of organizations, which has yielded some eye-opening observations. Organizations report that they were effectively blind to as many as 75% of their assets prior to using the platform.
The UpWest team is so excited about where CyCognito is going and look forward to supporting their efforts in the coming years.
