Boston cybersecurity startup Cybric announced $5 million in new funding today, as investors place more bets on tech companies promising to make security tools more sophisticated and unified.
Cybric says it closed a $6.3 million seed round. But that amount includes $1.3 million in funding announced in November 2015, a spokeswoman says. Cybric’s main backers are Capstone Ventures and Petrillo Capital.
Cybric offers what it calls a “continuous security-as-a-service platform” that aims to automate much of the process of finding and fixing holes in an organization’s cyber defenses, with a particular focus on application security.
As Xconomy reported earlier this year, Cybric’s approach involves creating a cloud-based replica of a customer’s network and processes, and running tests within that environment to detect threats. Cybric’s technology can pull in tools from other security vendors to perform tasks like penetration testing or scanning code for vulnerabilities; the startup’s own software can be used for such purposes as well.
The goal is to constantly and comprehensively search for weaknesses and quickly update security measures without interrupting business operations, Cybric says.
Cybric’s strategy fits into a couple of important themes emerging in the cybersecurity sector: unification and automation.
Aligning different types of cybersecurity products and being able to easily visualize an organization’s entire security system is becoming more urgent, as businesses and other organizations face more advanced threats and seek ways to make their various defense measures work together more cohesively.
Cybersecurity automation, meanwhile, could help relieve burdens for security and IT teams—and potentially make businesses more secure.
“Battling increasingly fierce cyber attacks and breaches requires greater human capital and specific expertise, both of which are in short supply among organizations worldwide and putting enterprises on their heels,” Cybric CEO and founder Ernesto DiGiambattista says in a press release. “Enterprises must proactively protect their critical applications and data without adding significant headcount and without posing a risk to their production environment.”
DiGiambattista formed the company last year. He previously was an executive with Bank of America and Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group. Other members of the company’s 13-person team include chief design officer Sean Walter, a former executive with Actifio, CloudHealth Technologies, and Verdasys; and chief innovation officer Mike Kail, a veteran of Yahoo and Netflix.
