Behavox Grabs Series A To Keep FinServ Employees Compliant

As businesses take cybersecurity to task, research has shown that the biggest threat to corporate data may come from within. Last year, the First Advantage Cybersecurity Survey found that firms are prioritizing employee background checks in an effort to safeguard their systems and information, while researchers highlighted the need for executives to deploy periodic employee screening to protect against insider security breaches.

A separate analysis outlined in the Insider Threat Report found that a majority of businesses are experiencing an increase of security threats and breaches due to an insider within the enterprise compared to a year ago.

With employees as some of the biggest cyberrisks for businesses, one startup has fixed its attention on enabling financial services companies to analyze troves of employee-generated data to safeguard a firm from another type of employee-generated threat: noncompliance.

Behavox assesses information from emails, texts and voice calls to pinpoint possible threats from employees to ensure institutions remain compliant with frequently changing mandates. On Wednesday (July 13), the firm announced a Series A funding round led by Hoxton Ventures and Promus Ventures, based in London and Chicago, respectively.

The company did not reveal the financial details of the funding.

Reports by TechCrunch said the investment will aid Behavox in expanding its team to up to 50 employees and to establish a headquarters in the U.S.

Behavox gears its solution towards investment banks, asset managers and other FinServ entities, providing machine learning and other technologies to automate the detection of employee-based misconduct, like insider trading, rogue trading and other threats, like IP theft or bribery.

Cofounder and CEO Erkin Adylov explained to the publication that its NLP (natural language processing) and voice analytics technologies can enable the identification of not just what was said during a phone call, for example, but who said it, where and when. Behavox also said that it competes by enabling the aggregation and analysis of data across sources, like landlines, messaging apps and mobile phones.