Cybersecurity start-up CardinalOps has announced the completion of a $ 6.5 million seed fundraising round, led by Glilot Capital, Battery Ventures and other angel investors in the cybersecurity field.
The company provides automated solutions for security operations centers (SOCs) which help companies easily manage and respond to cybersecurity threats, while mitigating the chances for human error.
The world of cybersecurity consists of many subsections that combine artificial intelligence technologies and automation to detect attackers. These technologies are powerful security solutions and any organization with significant activity has between 80 and 120 such solutions. However, this causes a gap to form between the impressive capabilities of the products in theory, and the way they are applied in the field. They are often not properly deployed, managed or maintained in the organization.
"History is full of stories about cases where there was an alert somewhere, but they did not see or hear it until they were questioned back after the disaster," says CardinalOps CEO and Founder Michael Mumcuoglu. "Our system makes it possible to manage cyber solutions correctly at points where their usefulness collapses. Most organizations are busy buying products, but do not have the people and knowledge in the field to manage the configuration and rules of dozens of [cybersecurity] products."
"There is an established trend in the cyber industry of AI implementation for threat detection and response automation, so we were surprised to learn how basic SOC engineering processes remain manual and inefficient," said Itzik Parnafes, a general partner from Battery Ventures.
"Michael and Yair [Manor, Founder and VP of Technology] have identified a significant market gap and developed this innovative platform for key engineering tasks that will impact The ability to defend in organizations," Parnafes added.
The company was founded in early 2020 by two of Israel's serial cyber entrepreneurs, the aforementioned Mumcuoglu and Manor. Mumcuoglu previously founded LightCyber, which was sold to Palo Alto Networks for $120 million and later morphed into the company's Cortex XDR activity for advanced attack detection. During that same time, Manor sold his cyber startup Netonomy, which was sold to Allot in 2018 for an unknown sum.
Mumcuoglu had known Manor following their acquaintance during their military service in IDF's 8200 Cybersecurity Unit, and had kept in contact with him over the years since, eventually deciding to start a joint venture together once Mumcuoglu returned to Israel from working in Palo Alto.
In early 2020, the two flew to present their initial product at the RSA Conference in California, the largest cyber show in the world. "This was the last chance for the whole industry to meet face to face before the coronavirus locked everyone down. When we returned to Israel, a state of emergency was declared in California due to the outbreak of the pandemic and all returnees were instructed to go into isolation," says Momcuoglu.
"At that time we thought about how to encounter potential customers and create that same trust without a physical meeting place to get our product physically to the organization, to gain access to sensitive organizational information. Half a year of flights, hotels and travel from place to place were converted to very many zoom calls," he said, adding that "in the end, it was still a successful year."