Noetic Cyber, a cloud-based continuous cyber asset management and controls platform, has launched from stealth with a Series A funding round of $15 million led by Energy Impact Partners.
The round was also backed by Noetic’s existing investors, TenEleven Ventures and GlassWing Ventures, and brings the total amount of funds raised by the startup to $20 million following a $5 million seed round. Shawn Cherian, a partner at Energy Impact Partners, will join the Noetic board, while Niloofar Razi Howe, a senior operating partner at the investment firm, will join Noetic’s advisory board.
“Noetic is a true market disruptor, offering an innovative way to fix the cyber asset visibility problem — a growing and persistent challenge in today’s threat landscape,” said Howe.
The Massachusetts-based startup claims to be taking a new approach to the cyber asset management problem. Unlike traditional solutions, Noetic is not agent-based, instead using API aggregation and correlation to draw insights from multiple security and IT management tools.
“What makes us different is that we’re putting orchestration and automation at the heart of the solution, so we’re not just showing security leaders that they have problems, but we’re helping them to fix them,” Paul Ayers, CEO and co-founder of Noetic Cyber tells TechCrunch.
Ayer was previously a top exec at PGP Corporation (acquired by Symantec for $370 million) and Vormetric (acquired by Thales for $400 million) and founded Noetic Cyber with Allen Roger and Allen Hadden, who have previously worked at cybersecurity vendors including Authentica, Raptor and Axent. All three were also integral to the development of Resilient Systems, which was acquired by IBM.
“The founding team’s experience in the security, orchestration, automation and response market gives us unique experience and insights to make automation a key pillar of the solution,” Ayers said. “Our model gives you the certainty to make automation possible, the goal is to find and fix problems continuously, getting assets back to a secure state.”
“The development of the technology has been impacted by the current cyber landscape, and the pandemic, as some of the market drivers we’ve seen around the adoption of cloud services, and the increased use of unmanaged devices by remote workers, are driving a great need for accurate cyber asset discovery and management.”
The company, which currently has 20 employees, says it plans to use the newly raised funds to double its headcount by the end of the year, as well as increase its go-to-market capability in the U.S. and the U.K. to grow its customer base and revenue growth.
“In terms of technology development, this investment allows us to continue to add development and product management talent to the team to build on our cyber asset management platform,” Ayers said.
“The beauty of our approach is that it allows us to easily add more applications and use cases on top of our core asset visibility and management model. We will continue to add more connectors to support customer use cases and will be bringing a comprehensive controls package to market later in 2021, as well as a community edition in 2022.”