With the growing volume of ransomware and supply chain security attacks, there is a need for organizations to more rapidly detect threats. It’s that opportunity that startup Hunters is looking to capitalize on as the company today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP).
Hunters, which has offices in Newton, Mass. and Tel Aviv, Israel, was founded in 2018 and has raised a total of $50.4 million to date. The company raised a seed round of $5.4 million in May 2019 led by YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital. A $15M Series A round followed in June 2020 with participation from Microsoft’s M12 and U.S. Venture Partners. An additional growth round was announced in December 2020, with Snowflake Ventures investing in Hunters.
The startup builds a technology known as Extended Threat Detection and Response (XDR) which pulls in data from different sources and sensors. All that data is then correlated and analyzed to ‘hunt’ for potential indicators of compromise. Hunters co-founder and CEO Uri May explained that his company’s Open XDR platform can help to identify the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that attackers use to gain access and exploit an organization. The goal is to help reduce the time to detection and accelerate the time to response for a potential security incident.
The involvement of Snowflake Ventures as an investor as well as Snowflake as a partner for Hunters is one of the reasons that attracted Bessemer to the company. Alex Ferrara, partner at BVP said that from his perspective while there are other vendors in the same space as Hunters, none of them have partnered with a cloud data warehouse vendor like Snowflake, which was a big differentiator for him. Overall, it’s the market landscape and current state of cyberattacks that makes Hunters an interesting startup for Ferrara and his firm.
“We are excited about Hunters because you know we are seeing the institutionalization of ransomware,” Ferrara, told TechCrunch. “So I think there is a need for something like Hunters that can be more proactive in a world where I think many enterprises and mid-market companies have already been compromised.”
Another key market trend that Ferrara sees Hunters fitting into is with the need to help fill the gap for talented security professionals. Hunters’ technology makes use of automation and machine learning, such that security analysts are able to be more effective in a shorter amount of time.
May said that the new funding will help to move Hunters to the next stage of the startup company’s evolution. To date, he said the company has hit its own internal milestones for customer acquisition and revenues, finding a good market fit for its XDR technology. Now he’s looking to scale the business, growing the go-to-market sales and marketing initiatives and partner efforts. May emphasized that he’s also keen to use the funding to cut through the increasingly noisy business of security technology with new innovations that will disrupt the market, providing even more capabilities to users.
Among the new innovations that Hunters is working on is enhanced machine learning technology to better understand and correlate sources of information. Expanding sources for the Hunters platform is another area where May expects to expand his company’s platform, with the future integration of more threat intelligence data feeds.
“There’s a very elaborate and unique roadmap that we’re working on in terms of innovation that is related to the research that we’re conducting around cybersecurity,” May said.