Uptycs is starting to make some noise. Today, the two-year-old cybersecurity startup announced a $10 million Series A funding round to help expand its team and advance its security analytics software.
The investment was led by ForgePoint Capital, a cybersecurity-focused venture firm formerly known as Trident Capital CyberSecurity, and Comcast Ventures, the venture arm of the telecommunications giant.
Waltham, MA-based Uptycs fits into several trends, including businesses’ growing use of open-source software and a push by technology companies to unify and simplify security tools. Uptycs said its platform is built upon osquery, which the company describes as an “open-source, universal endpoint agent developed by Facebook.” Osquery software can extract operating system data from servers and store it as a relational database that can be queried using SQL software. Uptycs software crunches that data, looking for “anomalies” and known cyber threats, the company wrote in an e-mail to Xconomy. Its software produces reports and alerts that help businesses and other organizations with cybersecurity issues such as intrusion detection, vulnerability management, and security compliance and auditing.
“As opposed to using a point solution for each requirement, we’ve taken a scalable structured approach to address the broader set of needs using SQL-powered analytics,” Uptycs CEO and founder Ganesh Pai wrote in a statement e-mailed to Xconomy. “We normalize security requirements into database lookups similar to how [customer relationship management] features are normalized by Salesforce or business operations are normalized by SAP.”
Endpoint security is a crowded market these days, but Pai sees room for Uptycs.
The “endpoint security market is a very broad market with different operating systems and multiple focus areas, ranging from detection to protection,” he wrote in the e-mailed statement. “The main pain points we are addressing are related to agent fatigue and enterprise’s desire to have a consolidated solution. We are well-poised to accomplish this goal.”
Prior to the new $10 million funding round, Uptycs raised $3 million in seed funding from Comcast Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and Founder Collective, Pai said. According to his LinkedIn profile, Pai previously served as chief architect of carrier products and strategy at Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AKAM]]), which acquired his last startup, Verivue, in 2012.
Uptycs employs 25 people full time and plans to add another 15 employees over the next few months, Pai said.
