YL Ventures
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Extra Crunch roundup: The Nuro EC-1, early-stage growth tactics, understanding Salesforce+
In 2010, Google’s autonomous vehicle project placed self-driving cars on Bay Area streets and freeways, but practical applications were thought to be at least a decade away.
The futurists were right on schedule: In 2020, Mountain View-based Nuro was testing its second-generation R2 robotic vehicle, the first to earn a federal exemption to operate an autonomous vehicle.
But before Nuro could even consider reaching product-market fit, its founders had to overcome technological challenges, win over regulators and strike partnerships with a range of consumer-facing companies.
“Neither JZ nor I think of ourselves as classic entrepreneurs or that starting a company is something we had to do in our lives,” says co-founder Dave Ferguson. “It was much more the result of soul searching and trying to figure out what is the biggest possible impact that we could have.”
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Across four articles, reporter Mark Harris (The Guardian, Wired, MIT Technology Review) explores Nuro’s origins and operations, including the founders’ decision to focus on creating autonomous delivery vehicles instead of entering the passenger EV market.
I’ve lived inside the San Francisco Bay Area bubble for most of my adult life, so it’s interesting to see how people in Houston’s Woodland Heights neighborhood react to seeing Nuro’s R2 delivering pizza and prescriptions on a limited basis.
As one Redditor recently posted in r/houston: “With these self-driving cars, it’s only a matter of time before a country song is written about a guy’s truck leaving him.”
Part 1: How Google’s self-driving car project accidentally spawned its robotic delivery rival
Part 2: Why regulators love Nuro’s self-driving delivery vehicles
Part 3: How Nuro became the robotic face of Domino’s
Part 4: Here’s what the inevitable friendly neighborhood robot invasion looks like
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Why fintechs are buying up legacy financial services companies
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Why bother to beat the competition when you can buy them outright?
“It used to be that if you were a fintech startup or, for lack of a better term, a digitally native financial services business, you might be eyeing an acquisition from an incumbent in the industry,” Ryan Lawler writes.
“But lately, fintech upstarts are the ones doing the acquiring.”
Growth tactics that will jump-start your customer base
Image Credits: Jasmin Merdan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
“With audiences spread out over so many platforms, reaching cult status requires some level of hacking,” Jenny Wang, a principal investor at Neo, writes in a guest column.
Covering everything from collecting user-generated content to launching splashy guerrilla marketing strategies that can take advantage of someone else’s events, she shares several growth tactics for startups, plus the metrics required to track their success.
There could be more to the Salesforce+ video streaming service than meets the eye
Image Credits: ppengcreative / Getty Images
Salesforce announced last week that it plans to launch a video streaming service.
The industry analysts who enterprise reporter Ron Miller interviewed said the initiative has tremendous potential, but one noted that Salesforce will have to dig deep to compete in today’s crowded media landscape.
Salesforce hasn’t released details on the type of programming it plans to offer, but given its vast and diverse customer base, its options are many. Said Brent Leary of CRM Essentials:
“A customer could sponsor a show, advertise a show or possibly collaborate on a show. And have leads generated from the show [which could be] directly tied to the activity from those options and track ROI. And it’s all done on one platform. And the content lives on with ads living on with them.”
More companies should shift to a work-from-home model
Image Credits: Ann Schwede (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Karl Laughton, president and COO of Insightly, offers best practices for companies looking to make the move to a remote model.
“Employers are at a crucial crossroads when it comes to deciding where and how to let employers do their jobs,” he writes in a guest column. “There are those who will adopt the work-from-anywhere model and those who resist it.
“Those who resist it will likely struggle to keep employees.”
Early-stage benchmarks for young cybersecurity companies
Image Credits: Getty Images under a Olivier Le Moal (opens in a new window) license.
YL Ventures’ Yoav Leitersdorf and Michael Cortez lay out a roadmap for founders of early-stage cybersecurity companies that are heading toward unicorn status.
“The early days of any young startup decide how successful it can be, which is why we’ve developed a focused, value-add program to support cybersecurity founders during this most critical stage and maximize their potential in building market-leading companies,” they write in a guest column.
“It’s never too early to think big, and, with the right support, launch the next industry titan.”
The hyperactive late-stage market should keep the startup investing game afoot
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm considers last week’s funding news from Carta, Chime and Discord and noodles on what the recent rounds mean for startups.
“Understanding why investors are so willing to buy minute stakes in dozens of private companies worth billions of dollars is key to grokking the crush of investment we see among younger technology startups.”
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Cycode raises $20M to secure DevOps pipelines
Israeli security startup Cycode, which specializes in helping enterprises secure their DevOps pipelines and prevent code tampering, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Seed investor YL Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the total funding in the company to $24.6 million.
Cycode’s focus was squarely on securing source code in its early days, but thanks to the advent of infrastructure as code (IaC), policies as code and similar processes, it has expanded its scope. In this context, it’s worth noting that Cycode’s tools are language and use case agnostic. To its tools, code is code.
“This ‘everything as code’ notion creates an opportunity because the code repositories, they become a single source of truth of what the operation should look like and how everything should function, Cycode CTO and co-founder Ronen Slavin told me. “So if we look at that and we understand it — the next phase is to verify this is indeed what’s happening, and then whenever something deviates from it, it’s probably something that you should look at and investigate.”
Cycode Dashboard. Image Credits: Cycode
The company’s service already provides the tools for managing code governance, leak detection, secret detection and access management. Recently it added its features for securing code that defines a business’ infrastructure; looking ahead, the team plans to add features like drift detection, integrity monitoring and alert prioritization.
“Cycode is here to protect the entire CI/CD pipeline — the development infrastructure — from end to end, from code to cloud,” Cycode CEO and co-founder Lior Levy told me.
“If we look at the landscape today, we can say that existing solutions in the market are kind of siloed, just like the DevOps stages used to be,” Levy explained. “They don’t really see the bigger picture, they don’t look at the pipeline from a holistic perspective. Essentially, this is causing them to generate thousands of alerts, which amplifies the problem even further, because not only don’t you get a holistic view, but also the noise level that comes from those thousands of alerts causes a lot of valuable time to get wasted on chasing down some irrelevant issues.”
What Cycode wants to do then is to break down these silos and integrate the relevant data from across a company’s CI/CD infrastructure, starting with the source code itself, which ideally allows the company to anticipate issues early on in the software life cycle. To do so, Cycode can pull in data from services like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Jenkins (among others) and scan it for security issues. Later this year, the company plans to integrate data from third-party security tools like Snyk and Checkmarx as well.
“The problem of protecting CI/CD tools like GitHub, Jenkins and AWS is a gap for virtually every enterprise,” said Jon Rosenbaum, principal at Insight Partners, who will join Cycode’s board of directors. “Cycode secures CI/CD pipelines in an elegant, developer-centric manner. This positions the company to be a leader within the new breed of application security companies — those that are rapidly expanding the market with solutions which secure every release without sacrificing velocity.”
The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its R&D efforts, and expand its sales and marketing teams. Levy and Slavin expect that the company will grow to about 65 employees this year, spread between the development team in Israel and its sales and marketing operations in the U.S.
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Orca Security raises $210M Series C at a unicorn valuation
Orca Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that offers an agent-less security platform for protecting cloud-based assets, today announced that it has raised a $210 million Series C round at a $1.2 billion valuation. The round was led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG and Redpoint Ventures. Existing investors GGV Capital, ICONIQ Growth and angel syndicate Silicon Valley CISO Investment also participated. YL Ventures, which led Orca’s seed round and participated in previous rounds, is not participating in this round — and it’s worth noting that the firm recently sold its stake in Axonius after that company reached unicorn status.
If all of this sounds familiar, that may be because Orca only raised its $55 million Series B round in December, after it announced its $20.5 million Series A round in May. That’s a lot of funding rounds in a short amount of time, but something we’ve been seeing more often in the last year or so.
Orca Security co-founders Gil Geron (left) and Avi Shua (right). Image Credits: Orca Security
As Orca co-founder and CEO Avi Shua told me, the company is seeing impressive growth and it — and its investors — want to capitalize on this. The company ended last year beating its own forecast from a few months before, which he noted was already aggressive, by more than 50%. Its current slate of customers includes Robinhood, Databricks, Unity, Live Oak Bank, Lemonade and BeyondTrust.
“We are growing at an unprecedented speed,” Shua said. “We were 20-something people last year. We are now closer to a hundred and we are going to double that by the end of the year. And yes, we’re using this funding to accelerate on every front, from dramatically increasing the product organization to add more capabilities to our platform, for post-breach capabilities, for identity access management and many other areas. And, of course, to increase our go-to-market activities.”
Shua argues that most current cloud security tools don’t really work in this new environment. Many, because they are driven by metadata, can only detect a small fraction of the risks, and agent-based solutions may take months to deploy and still not cover a business’ entire cloud estate. The promise of Orca Security is that it can not only cover a company’s entire range of cloud assets but that it is also able to help security teams prioritize the risks they need to focus on. It does so by using what the company calls its “SideScanning” technology, which allows it to map out a company’s entire cloud environment and file systems.
“Almost all tools are essentially just looking at discrete risk trees and not the forest. The risk is not just about how pickable the lock is, it’s also where the lock resides and what’s inside the box. But most tools just look at the issues themselves and prioritize the most pickable lock, ignoring the business impact and exposure — and we change that.”
It’s no secret that there isn’t a lot of love lost between Orca and some of its competitors. Last year, Palo Alto Networks sent Orca Security a sternly worded letter (PDF) to stop it from comparing the two services. Shua was not amused at the time and decided to fight it. “I completely believe there is space in the markets for many vendors, and they’ve created a lot of great products. But I think the thing that simply cannot be overlooked, is a large company that simply tries to silence competition. This is something that I believe is counterproductive to the industry. It tries to harm competition, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional. You can’t use lawyers to take your competitors out of the media.”
Currently, though, it doesn’t look like Orca needs to worry too much about the competition. As GGV Capital managing partner Glenn Solomon told me, as the company continues to grow and bring in new customers — and learn from the data it pulls in from them — it is also able to improve its technology.
“Because of the novel technology that Avi and [Orca Security co-founder and CPO] Gil [Geron] have developed — and that Orca is now based on — they see so much. They’re just discovering more and more ways and have more and more plans to continue to expand the value that Orca is going to provide to customers. They sit in a very good spot to be able to continue to leverage information that they have and help DevOps teams and security teams really execute on good hygiene in every imaginable way going forward. I’m super excited about that future.”
As for this funding round, Shua noted that he found CapitalG to be a “huge believer” in this space and an investor that is looking to invest into the company for the long run (and not just trying to make a quick buck). The fact that CapitalG is associated with Alphabet was obviously also a draw.
“Being associated with Alphabet, which is one of the three major cloud providers, allowed us to strengthen the relationship, which is definitely a benefit for Orca,” he said. “During the evaluation, they essentially put Orca in front of the security leadership at Google. Definitely, they’ve done their own very deep due diligence as part of that.”
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YL Ventures sells its stake in cybersecurity unicorn Axonius for $270M
YL Ventures, the Israel-focused cybersecurity seed fund, today announced that it has sold its stake in cybersecurity asset management startup Axonius, which only a week ago announced a $100 million Series D funding round that now values it at around $1.2 billion.
ICONIQ Growth, Alkeon Capital Management, DTCP and Harmony Partners acquired YL Venture’s stake for $270 million. This marks YL’s first return from its third $75 million fund, which it raised in 2017, and the largest return in the firm’s history.
With this sale, the company’s third fund still has six portfolio companies remaining. It closed its fourth fund with $120 million in committed capital in the middle of 2019.
Unlike YL, which focuses on early-stage companies — though it also tends to participate in some later-stage rounds — the investors that are buying its stake specialize in later-stage companies that are often on an IPO path. ICONIQ Growth has invested in the likes of Adyen, CrowdStrike, Datadog and Zoom, for example, and has also regularly partnered with YL Ventures on its later-stage investments.
“The transition from early-stage to late-stage investors just makes sense as we drive toward IPO, and it allows each investor to focus on what they do best,” said Dean Sysman, co-founder and CEO of Axonius. “We appreciate the guidance and support the YL Ventures team has provided during the early stages of our company and we congratulate them on this successful journey.”
To put this sale into perspective for the Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv-based YL Ventures, it’s worth noting that it currently manages about $300 million. Its current portfolio includes the likes of Orca Security, Hunters and Cycode. This sale is a huge win for the firm.
Its most headline-grabbing exit so far was Twistlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $410 million in 2019, but it has also seen exits of its portfolio companies to Microsoft, Proofpoint, CA Technologies and Walmart, among others. The fund participated in Axonius’ $4 million seed round in 2017 up to its $58 million Series C round a year ago.
It seems like YL Ventures is taking a very pragmatic approach here. It doesn’t specialize in late-stage firms — and until recently, Israeli startups always tended to sell long before they got to a late-stage round anyway. And it can generate a nice — and guaranteed — return for its own investors, too.
“This exit netted $270 million in cash directly to our third fund, which had $75 million total in capital commitments, and this fund still has six outstanding portfolio companies remaining,” Yoav Leitersdorf, YL Ventures’ founder and managing partner, told me. “Returning multiple times that fund now with a single exit, with the rest of the portfolio companies still there for the upside is the most responsible — yet highly profitable path — we could have taken for our fund at this time. And all this while diverting our energies and means more towards our seed-stage companies (where our help is more impactful), and at the same time supporting Axonius by enabling it to bring aboard such excellent late-stage investors as ICONIQ and Alkeon — a true win-win-win situation for everyone involved!”
He also noted that this sale achieved a top-decile return for the firm’s limited partners and allows it to focus its resources and attention toward the younger companies in its portfolio.
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2020 was a record year for Israel’s security startup ecosystem
From COVID-19’s curve to election polls, public temperature checks to stimulus checks, 2020 was dominated by numbers — the guiding compass of any self-respecting venture capital investor.
As a VC exclusively focused on investments in Israeli cybersecurity, the numbers that guide us have become some of the most interesting to watch over the course of the past year.
The start of a new year presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the annual performance of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem and prepare for what the next twelve months of innovation will bring. With the global cybersecurity market outperforming this year’s panic-stricken expectations, we carefully combed through the figures to see how Israel’s market, its strongest performer, compared — and predict what it has in store.
The cybersecurity market continues to draw the confidence of investors, who appear to recognize its heightened importance during times of crisis.
The “cyber nation” not only remained strong throughout the pandemic, but even saw a rise in fundraising, especially around application and cloud security, following the emergence of remote workflow security gaps brought on by social distancing. Encouraged by this, investors have demonstrated committed enthusiasm to its growth and M&A landscape.
Emboldened by the sector’s overall strength and new opportunities, today’s Israeli visionaries are developing stronger convictions to build larger companies; many of them, already successful entrepreneurs, are making their own bets in the industry as serial entrepreneurs and angel investors.
Image Credits: YL Ventures (opens in a new window)
The numbers also reveal how investors are increasingly concentrating their funds on larger seed rounds for serial entrepreneurs and the foremost industry trends. More than $2.75 billion was poured into the industry this year to back companies across all stages, a 97% increase from last year’s $1.39 billion. If its long-term slope is any indication, we can only expect it to continue to grow.
However, though they clearly indicate progress, the numbers still make the need for a demographic reset clear. Like the rest of the industry, Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem must adapt to the pace of change set out by this year’s social movements, and the time has long passed for true diversity and gender representation in cybersecurity leadership.
Seed rounds reveal fascinating shifts
As the market’s biggest leaders garner experience and expertise, the bar for entry to Israel’s cybersecurity startup ecosystem has gradually risen over the years. However, this did not appear to impact this year’s entrepreneurial breakthroughs. 58% of Israel’s newly founded cybersecurity companies received seed rounds this year, totaling 64 seeded companies in 2020 compared with last year’s 61. The total number of newly founded companies increased by 5%, reversing last year’s downward trend.
The amount invested at seed hit an all-time high as average deal size in 2020 increased by 11%, amounting to an average of $5.2 million per deal. This continues an upward trend in average seed rounds, which have surged over the last four years due to sizable year-on-year increases. It also provides further support for a shift toward higher caliber seed rounds with a strategically focused and “all-in” approach. In other words, founders that meet the new bar for entry are raising bigger rounds for more ambitious visions.
Image Credits: YL Ventures
Where is the money going?
2020 proved an exceptional year for application security and cloud security startups. Perhaps the runaway successes of Snyk and Checkmarx left strong impressions. This year saw an explosive 140% increase in application security company seed investments (such as Enso Security, build.security and CloudEssence), as well as a whopping 200% increase in cloud security seed investments (like Solvo and DoControl), from last year.
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Ride Vision raises $7M for its AI-based motorcycle safety system
Ride Vision, an Israeli startup that is building an AI-driven safety system to prevent motorcycle collisions, today announced that it has raised a $7 million Series A round led by crowdsourcing platform OurCrowd. YL Ventures, which typically specializes in cybersecurity startups but also led the company’s $2.5 million seed round in 2018, Mobilion VC and motorcycle mirror manufacturer Metagal also participated in this round. The company has now raised a total of $10 million.
In addition to this new funding round, Ride Vision also today announced a new partnership with automotive parts manufacturer Continental .
“As motorcycle enthusiasts, we at Ride Vision are excited at the prospect of our international launch and our partnership with Continental,” Uri Lavi, CEO and co-founder of Ride Vision, said in today’s announcement. “This moment is a major milestone, as we stride toward our dream of empowering bikers to feel truly safe while they enjoy the ride.”
The general idea here is pretty straightforward and comparable with the blind-spot monitoring system in your car. Using computer vision, Ride Vision’s system, the Ride Vision 1, analyzes the traffic around a rider in real time. It provides forward collision alerts and monitors your blind spot, but it can also tell you when you’re following another rider or car too closely. It can also simply record your ride and, coming soon, it’ll be able to make emergency calls on your behalf when things go awry.
As the company argues, the number of motorcycles (and other motorized two-wheeled vehicles) has only increased during the pandemic, as people started avoiding public transport and looked for relatively affordable alternatives. In Europe, sales of two-wheeled vehicles increased by 30% during the pandemic.
The hardware on the motorcycle itself is pretty straightforward. It includes two wide-angle cameras (one each at the front and rear), as well as alert indicators on the mirrors, as well as the main computing unit. Ride Vision has patents on its human-machine warning interface and vision algorithms.
It’s worth noting that there are some blind-spot monitoring solutions for motorcycles on the market already, including those from Innovv and Senzar. Honda also has patents on similar technologies. These do not provide the kind of 360-degree view that Ride Vision is aiming for.
Ride Vision says its products will be available in Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Greece, Israel and the U.K. in early 2021, with the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Australia, Japan, India, China and others following later.
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Orca Security raises $20M Series A for its multi-cloud security platform
Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments on AWS, Azure and GCP, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by GGV Capital. YL Ventures and Silicon Valley CISO Investments also participated in this round. Together with its seed investment led by YL Ventures, this brings Orca’s total funding to $27 million.
One feature that makes Orca stand out is its ability to quickly provide workload-level visibility without the need for an agent or network scanner. Instead, Orca uses low-level APIs that allow it to gain visibility into what exactly is running in your cloud.
The founders of Orca all have a background as architects and CTOs at other companies, including the likes of Check Point Technologies, as well as the Israeli army’s Unit 8200. As Orca CPO and co-founder Gil Geron told me in a meeting in Tel Aviv earlier this year, the founders were looking for a big enough problem to solve and it quickly became clear that at the core of most security breaches were misconfigurations or the lack of security tools in the right places. “What we deduced is that in too many cases, we have the security tools that can protect us, but we don’t have them in the right place at the right time,” Geron, who previously led a security team at Check Point, said. “And this is because there is this friction between the business’ need to grow and the need to have it secure.”
Orca delivers its solution as a SaaS platform and on top of providing work level visibility into these public clouds, it also offers security tools that can scan for vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, password issues, secret keys in personally identifiable information.
“In a software-driven world that is moving faster than ever before, it’s extremely difficult for security teams to properly discover and protect every cloud asset,” said GGV managing partner Glenn Solomon . “Orca Security’s novel approach provides unparalleled visibility into these assets and brings this power back to the CISO without slowing down engineering.”
Orca Security is barely a year and a half old, but it also counts companies like Flexport, Fiverr, Sisene and Qubole among its customers.
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Israel’s cybersecurity startup scene spawned new entrants in 2019
Yoav Leitersdorf is the Silicon Valley-based Managing Partner at YL Ventures, where he accelerates cybersecurity startups in the U.S. market.
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Ofer Schreiber is partner and head of Israel Office at YL Ventures, where he seeds and accelerates cybersecurity startups.
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As the global cybersecurity market becomes increasingly crowded, the Start Up Nation remains a bulwark of innovation and opportunity generation for investors and global cyber companies alike. It achieved this chiefly in 2019 by adapting to the industry’s competitive developments and pushing forward its most accomplished entrepreneurs in larger numbers to meet them.
New data illustrates how Israeli entrepreneurs have seized on the country’s reputation for building radically cutting-edge technologies as the number of new Israeli cybersecurity startups addressing nascent sectors eclipses its more traditional counterparts. Moreover, related findings highlight how cybersecurity companies looking to expand beyond their traditional offerings are entering Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem in larger numbers through highly strategic acquisitions.
Broadly, new findings also reveal the Israeli cybersecurity market’s overall coming of age, seasoned entrepreneurial dominance and greater appetite for longer-term visions and strategies — the latter of which received record-breaking investor backing in 2019.
Breaking records
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Satori Cyber raises $5.25M to help businesses protect their data flows
The amount of data that most companies now store — and the places they store it — continues to increase rapidly. With that, the risk of the wrong people managing to get access to this data also increases, so it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing a number of startups that focus on protecting this data and how it flows between clouds and on-premises servers. Satori Cyber, which focuses on data protecting and governance, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed round led by YL Ventures.
“We believe in the transformative power of data to drive innovation and competitive advantage for businesses,” the company says. “We are also aware of the security, privacy and operational challenges data-driven organizations face in their journey to enable broad and optimized data access for their teams, partners and customers. This is especially true for companies leveraging cloud data technologies.”
Satori is officially coming out of stealth mode today and launching its first product, the Satori Cyber Secure Data Access Cloud. This service provides enterprises with the tools to provide access controls for their data, but maybe just as importantly, it also offers these companies and their security teams visibility into their data flows across cloud and hybrid environments. The company argues that data is “a moving target” because it’s often hard to know how exactly it moves between services and who actually has access to it. With most companies now splitting their data between lots of different data stores, that problem only becomes more prevalent over time and continuous visibility becomes harder to come by.
“Until now, security teams have relied on a combination of highly segregated and restrictive data access and one-off technology-specific access controls within each data store, which has only slowed enterprises down,” said Satori Cyber CEO and co-founder Eldad Chai. “The Satori Cyber platform streamlines this process, accelerates data access and provides a holistic view across all organizational data flows, data stores and access, as well as granular access controls, to accelerate an organization’s data strategy without those constraints.”
Both co-founders (Chai and CTO Yoav Cohen) previously spent nine years building security solutions at Imperva and Incapsula (which acquired Imperva in 2014). Based on this experience, they understood that onboarding had to be as easy as possible and that operations would have to be transparent to the users. “We built Satori’s Secure Data Access Cloud with that in mind, and have designed the onboarding process to be just as quick, easy and painless. On-boarding Satori involves a simple host name change and does not require any changes in how your organizational data is accessed or used,” they explain.
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Vulcan Cyber announces $10M Series A to automate security patching efforts
Many software vulnerabilities are already known, and vendors have even issued patches, but the problem is there are so many patches that it’s often difficult for companies to keep up. Vulcan Cyber wants to help by bringing a level of automation to the patching operation, and in the process reduce exposure to known risks.
Today, it announced a $10 million Series A round from Ten Eleven Ventures and YL Ventures .
In a typical scenario, security researchers find vulnerabilities, the vendors disclose them and patch them. From there it’s up to individual companies to take care of downloading and installing the patch, but Vulcan Cyber co-founder and CEO Yaniv Bar-Dayan says the number of patches has been growing at a furious pace with 6000 patches in 2016, 16,000 in 2017 and 18,000 last year. And that growth trajectory is continuing this year, he says.
Vulcan’s ultimate mission is to help companies remediate security vulnerabilities from their infrastructure. They do this by bringing a level of automation to the process, recognizing that humans can’t keep up with these numbers. “We automate the process of prioritization and deployment to remediate more vulnerabilities faster,” Bar-Dayan explained. What’s more, he said that Vulcan does this without risking business operations, while reducing risk and costs.
Vulcan Cyber risk prioritization view. Screenshot: Vulcan Cyber
The company raised a $4 million seed round last year, bringing the total raised to $14 million so far. As TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois pointed out while writing about that seed round, it’s able to achieve this level of automation, while working with the tools developers and security teams typically work with anyway.
“Vulcan Cyber plays nicely with all of the major cloud platforms, as well as tools like Puppet, Chef and Ansible, as well as GitHub and Bitbucket. It also integrates with a number of major security testing tools and vulnerability scanners, including Black Duck, Nessus, Fortify, Tripwire, Checkmarx, Rapid7 and Veracode,” Lardinois wrote.
The company was founded last year and has 25 employees. It plans to continue building its engineering team in Israel with the money from this round, as well as opening an office in San Francisco for sales, marketing and customer success.
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