Cymulate raises $70 million to help cybersecurity teams test their networks with attack simulations

The cost of cybercrime has been rising at an alarming rate of 15% per year, and is expected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. To meet the challenges this poses, Organizations are turning to a range of AI-powered tools to complement their existing security software and the work of their security teams. Today, a startup called Cymulate - which has built a platform to help these teams automatically and continuously test their networks against potential attacks with simulations, and provides guidance on how to improve their systems to ward off to real attacks — announces a major fundraising round for its growth after seeing strong demand for its tools.

The startup - founded in Tel Aviv, with a second base in New York - has raised $70 million, a Series D that it will use to continue to grow globally and invest in the expansion of its technology (both organically and potentially through acquisitions).

Today, Cymulate's platform spans both on-premises and cloud networks, providing breach and attack simulations for endpoints, email and web gateways, and more. ; automated "red team"; and a "purple team" facility to create and launch different security breach scenarios for organizations that lack the resources to dedicate people to a live red team - overall a "holistic" solution for enterprises looking to ensure they are getting the most out of the network security architecture they already have in place, in the worlds of Eyal Wachsman, CEO of Cymulate.

“We offer our customers a different approach to how to do cybersecurity and get information about all the products already implemented in a network,” he said in an interview. The resulting platform has found particular traction in the current market climate. While companies continue to invest in their security architecture, security teams are also feeling the pressure of the market, impacting IT budgets, and sometimes headcount in an industry that was already facing a shortage. of expertise. (Cymulate cites figures from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology that estimate a shortage of 2.72 million security professionals in the global workforce.)

The idea with Cymulate is to create something that helps organizations make the most of what they already have. "And in the end, we provide our customers with the ability to prioritize where they need to invest, in terms of reducing gaps in their environment," Wachsman said.

The round is led by One Peak, with participation from Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), Vertex Ventures Israel, Vertex Growth and strategic backing from Dell Technologies Capital. (All five also backed Cymulate in its $45m Series C round last year.) Relatively speaking, this is a big round for Cymulate, doubling its total raised to $141m, and well that the startup is not disclosing its valuation, I understand from sources that it's around the $500 million mark.

Wachsman noted that the funding comes on the heels of a big year for the startup (the irony being that the ever-worsening cybersecurity problem and growing threat landscape is good news for companies designed to combat this). Revenue has doubled, although it is not disclosing any numbers today, and the company now has over 200 employees and works with some 500 paying customers across the enterprise and mid-market, including NTT, Telit and Euronext, against 300 customers per year. there is.

Wachsman, who co-founded the company with Avihai Ben-Yossef and Eyal Gruner, said he first thought of creating a platform to continuously test the threat posture of an organization in 2016, after years of working in cybersecurity consulting for other companies. He found that no matter how hard his clients and outside consultants put in the design of security solutions annually or semi-annually, those gains were potentially lost whenever a malicious hacker took an unexpected action.

"If the bad guys decided to break into the organization, they could, so we had to come up with a different approach," he said. He turned to AI and machine learning for the solution, a complement to everything that already exists in the organization, to build "a machine that allows you to test your security controls and your security posture , continuously and on demand, and get the results immediately...one step before hackers."

Last year, Wachsman described Cymulate's approach to me as "the largest cybersecurity consultancy without consultants," but in reality the...