Cybersecurity startup Panaseer raises $26.5M Series B led by AllegisCyber Capital

Published May 11, 2021

Panaseer, which takes a data science approach to cybersecurity, has raised $26.5 million in a Series B funding led by AllegisCyber Capital. Existing investors, including Evolution Equity Partners, Notion Capital, AlbionVC, Cisco Investments and Paladin Capital Group, as well as new investor National Grid Partners, also participated. Panaseer has now raised $43 million to date.

Panaseer’s special sauce and sales pitch amount to what it calls “Continuous Controls Monitoring” (CCM). In plainer English that means correlating a great deal of data from all available security tools to check assets, control gaps, you name it.

As a result, the company says it can identify zero-day and other exposures faster, or exposure to, say, FireEye or SolarWinds vulnerabilities.

Jonathan Gill, CEO, Panaseer said: “Most enterprises have the tools and capability to theoretically prevent a breach from occurring. However, one of the key reasons that breaches occur is that there is no technology to monitor and react to failed controls. CCM continuously validates and measures levels of protection and provides notifications of failures. Ultimately, CCM enables these failures to be fixed before they become security incidents.”

Speaking to me on a call he added: “The investment, allows us to scale our organization to meet those demands of customers with a team of people to implement the platform and help them get tremendous value and to evolve the product. To add more and more capability to that technology to support more and more use cases. So they’re the two main directions, and there’s a market we think of tens of thousands of organizations of a certain size, who are regulated or they have assets worth protecting and a level of complexity that makes it difficult to solve the problem themselves. And our Advisory Board and the customers I’ve spoken with think maybe there are barely 20 companies in the world who can solve this problem. And everybody else gets stuck on the fact that it’s a really difficult data science problem to solve. So we want to scale that and take that to more organizations.”

How to respond to a data breach

And why did they pick these investors: “I think we picked them and they picked us, we’ve been on that journey together. It takes months to find the best combination. The dollars are all the same when it comes to investors, but I think they can help improve as an organization and grow just like the existing investors do. They give us access and reach into parts of the market and help make us better as organizations as well.”

Bob Ackerman, founder and managing director of AllegisCyber Capital, and co-founder of DataTribe said: “The emergence of Continuous Controls Monitoring as a new cybersecurity category demonstrates a ‘coming of age’ for cybersecurity. Cyber is the existential threat to the global digital economy. All levels of the enterprise, from the CISO, to Chief Risk Officer, to the Board of Directors are demanding comprehensive visibility, transparency and hard metrics to assess cyber situational awareness.”

$125 million for Inscripta may usher in the next wave of genetic engineering

Published December 10, 2019

In these waning days of the second decade of the twenty-first century, technologists and investors are beginning to lay the foundations for new, truly transformational technologies that have the potential to reshape entire industries and rewrite the rules of human understanding.

It may sound lofty, but new achievements from businesses and research institutions in areas like machine learning, quantum computing and genetic engineering mean that the futures imagined in science fiction are simply becoming science.

And among the technologies that could potentially have the biggest effect on the way we live, nothing looms larger than genetic engineering.

Investors and entrepreneurs are deploying hundreds of millions of dollars to create the tools that researchers, scientists and industry will use to re-engineer the building blocks of life to perform different functions in agriculture, manufacturing and medicine.

One of these companies, 10X Genomics, which gives users hardware and software to determine the functionality of different genetic code, has already proven how lucrative this early market can be. The company, which had its initial public offering earlier this year, is now worth $6 billion.

Another, the still-private company Inscripta, is helmed by a former 10X Genomics executive. The Boulder, Colo.-based startup is commercializing a machine that can let researchers design and manufacture small quantities of new organisms. If 10X Genomics is giving scientists and businesses a better way to read and understand the genome, then Inscripta is giving those same users a new way to write their own genetic code and make their own organisms.

It’s a technology that investors are falling over themselves to finance. The company, which closed on $105 million in financing earlier in the year (through several tranches, which began in late 2018), has just raised another $125 million on the heels of launching its first commercial product. Investors in the round include new and previous investors like Paladin Capital Group, JS Capital Management, Oak HC/FT and Venrock.

“Biology has unlimited potential to positively change this world,” says Kevin Ness, the chief executive of Inscripta . “It’s one of the most important new technology forces that will be a major player in the global economy.”

Ness sees Inscripta as breaking down one of the biggest barriers to the commercialization of genetic engineering, which is access to the technology.

While genome centers and biology foundries can manufacture massive quantities of new biological material for industrial uses, it’s too costly and centralized for most researchers. “We can put the biofoundry capabilities into a box that can be pushed to a global researcher,” says Ness.

Earlier this year, the company announced that it was taking orders for its first bio-manufacturing product; the new capital is designed to pay for expanding its manufacturing capabilities.

That wasn’t the only barrier that Inscripta felt that it needed to break down. The company also developed a proprietary biochemistry for gene editing, hoping to avoid having to pay fees to one of the two laboratories that were engaged in a pitched legal battle over who owned the CRISPR technology (the Broad Institute and the University of California both had claims to the technology).