Siemplify, a cyber-threat management and analysis firm with outposts in both Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York City, announced a $10 million round of Series A financing Tuesday, continuing what has been a busy month for cybersecurity investments across the country.
The new investment, led by 83North Venture Capital and G20 Ventures, brings Siemplify’s total funding to about $14 million, according to Amos Stern, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Stern, a veteran of the Israel Defense Force Intelligence Corps, started the company with longtime colleagues Garry Fatakhov and Alon Cohen last year.
“This funding will enable us to expand our vision of a single pane of glass and meet the escalating demand we are seeing within the enterprise and MSSP (managed security service provider) marketplaces,” Stern said in a statement.
The bedrock of Siemplify’s technology is composed of graphing software known as ThreatNexus, which helps analysts and security operations center (SOC) teams consolidate a slew of alerts and information onto a single screen.
“You can almost think of it as an operating system for the SOC,” said Yoram Snir, founding member and partner at 83North, formerly known as Greylock IL. “Most cyber attacks come through more than one security tool, and most of these tools are managed in silos. These SOC teams are facing more and more threats…so [tracking] becomes a very, very hard task. That’s where Siemplfy comes in.”
Early customer feedback regarding the condensed alert system is what inspired Bill Wiberg, a founding partner of Boston-based G20 Ventures, to invest in Siemplify.
“Current and prospective customers have made it remarkably clear to us that ThreatNexus is now the primary tool their analysts rely on to respond to threats,” Wiberg said in a statement. “SOC teams no longer have to navigate across multiple tools and siloed systems to investigate and mitigate cyber threats.”
Other investors involved in this latest round of financing include Dave Strohm of Greylock Partners and Alex Daly, founder of fellow cybersecurity firm ArcSight.
Stern said Siemplify will use the new money to expand operations in the U.S., first near the banking centers of the East Coast, and eventually spreading to the country’s western shores. He said his team is also bullish on the cyber market in the U.K., Germany, and Southeast Asia.
Stern said he believes the cybersecurity market is going to continue to grow in the coming years, despite an increasingly dire shortage of qualified workers.
“It’s not a problem where you can just throw more people at it,” he said. “One, you don’t have the people, and two, it’s too much to process all of these data. The solution has to be a machine that’s doing something; helping, arming, and empowering the team to do things in a more efficient way.”
The information security workforce is expected to face a shortfall of about 1.5 million employees by 2020, according to Frost and Sullivan’s 2015 global information security workforce study. Those numbers — the most recent statistics calculated by Frost and Sullivan — are based on surveys completed by nearly 14,000 information security professionals over a four-month period in late 2014 and early 2015.
“I think it’s more and more clear how this is not going to be something that someone needs to take care of in the background like it was 10 or seven years ago,” Stern said. “[Cybersecurity] is now something that’s dead center.”
Cybersecurity Ventures, a cyber-focused research publication with branches in California and New York, predicted worldwide spending on cybersecurity products and services will surpass $1 trillion in the five-year stint from 2017 to 2021, according to the organization’s Q3 report. The company also estimated that the annual cost of cyber crimes will tally $6 trillion in just six years, according to the same report.
Just this year, annual global spending on information security is expected to hit $81.6 billion, which would mark a 7.9 percent increase over last year’s total, according to an August forecast report from Gartner.
Siemplify joins Claroty, another cybersecurity startup with outposts in both Tel Aviv and New York, as a recent recipient of VC funding. Claroty announced it had scooped up $32 million in investments in early September, according to a press release.
New York-based HYPR Corp., which aims to help companies safeguard biometric data, also announced the closure of a $3 million venture round in mid-October, according to the firm’s CrunchBase profile.
Other notable cyber-related ventures to rake in funding in the past week include RiskIQ, a San Francisco-based threat management firm, which raised $30.5 million in a Series C round on Nov. 10; Bay Area-based Castle, which monitors accounts and deters takeovers of Web and mobile apps, and received $2 million in a seed round on Nov. 9; and Heureka Software, a Cleveland, OH, firm that allows clients to survey so-called “dark data” and which received $1.1 million in seed funding on Nov. 10.