CyCognito Closes $100M Series C to Advance Attack Surface Protection

Attack surface management (ASM) startup CyCognito raised $100 million in a Series C funding round led by The Westly Group, according to a press release on Wednesday (Dec. 1).

New investors Thomvest Ventures and The Heritage Group also participated in the funding round, along with existing backers Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sorenson Ventures and UpWest.

CyCognito has raised $153 million to date and has an estimated valuation of $800 million, according to media reports. Founded in 2017 by current CEO Rob Gurzeev and current chief technology officer Dima Potekhin, the Silicon Valley startup automates attacker techniques to protect an organization.

Using bots to analyze and classify digital assets, CyCognito uses several methods to trace the connections of stakeholders, including subsidiaries, vendors, partners, cloud platforms, exposed on-premises assets and third-party systems.

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“Our number one priority is to provide global enterprises with world-class attack surface protection,” said Gurzeev, adding that CyCognito has created an adaptive “intelligent platform” that offers far-reaching external ASM.

“Our proactive approach to discovering and prioritizing risk is unmatched in the industry and provides security teams with the insight and confidence to quickly preempt potential attacks,” he said.

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CyCognito offers the first external ASM platform that strives to deliver a thorough cybersecurity risk solution that works fast to prioritize, investigate and respond when a potential threat is detected.

Tapping machine learning and natural language understanding, the platform independently generates a data model of an organization’s business structure. Aside from internal departments, the model also includes subsidiaries, acquisitions and owned brands.

The data model is further comprised of scans from billions of servers and devices across the web to “contextualize and identify internet-exposed and unmanaged assets that could serve as entry points for attackers.”

The solution also reveals how attackers see a business, where infiltration weaknesses are located, and what systems and assets are the most vulnerable.