Hexadite, a company that analyzes cyber threats and helps determine whether they require action or are false alarms, announced an $8 million Series A round today.
The investment was funded by Hewlett Packard Ventures, Ten Eleven Ventures and YL Ventures, which also invested in Hexadite’s seed round. Today’s investment brings the early stage startup up to $10.5 million including that seed round.
Hexadite makes software that automates threat detection and response. It helps determine whether a threat inside your perimeter is real or a false alarm and it automates remediation of actual issues. When 37 percent of large enterprises are reporting getting upwards of 10,000 threats a month, they need a tool that can help them sort through the information in an automated fashion and separate out the noise from actual issues, Hexadite CEO Eran Barak told TechCrunch.
In a time when large-scale breaches in the public and private sectors have become common place, companies and governments are desperately searching for automated solutions that can help sniff out real problems as they happen before they do any real damage.
Barak was particularly excited about Hewlett Packard Venture’s involvement because it provides a certain level of validation for a young startup to be funded by the venture arm of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Not only that, it gives them access to the HPE’s vast resources including possibly working with the company’s much larger sales and marketing team, Barak explained.
It also gives the company a bit more legitimacy. With HP’s backing, Barak believes they can now sign longer term deals and give customers confidence they will be around for the long haul.
“This is a very calculated round to take us to the next step. It allow us to enrich the product with more investigation logic and other capabilities we are working on,” Barak said. It will also allow them to start to build out sales and marketing.
The company currently has 20 employees, but he expects to use the funding to increase its sales team in the US perhaps doubling from 5 to 10 here and adding more engineering talent to the R&D team in Israel. The plan also calls for opening up a UK sales office. In all, they expect to double the number of employees by the end of the year, which seems to be the standard metric for any round.
Currently Hexadite has about a dozen customers across a variety of verticals and hopes to increase that pretty substantially this year. Barak believes that with help they could get from HP and current prospects looking at the product, the company should achieve that.
For now, he says this round of funding should carry him 18-24 months before he feels he has to go back to get more, perhaps giving another data point that the days of spending big money to get customers could be coming to an end.