E8 Security, an innovator of behavioral intelligence for cybersecurity, today announced that it has closed a $12 million Series B funding round. Strategic Cyber Ventures led the round, bringing total funding to date to $21.8 million. All three Series A investors -- March Capital Partners, Allegis Capital, and The Hive -- also participated in the round. The new funding will be used for continued innovation of the E8 Security Behavioral Intelligence Platform, as well as to fuel go-to-market and sales execution efforts to support the accelerated demand for the platform's ability to detect the early warning signs associated with potential compromise or unknown security threats.
"Strategic Cyber Ventures is thrilled to add E8 Security to our growing portfolio of disruptive cybersecurity companies," said Hank Thomas, Chief Operating Officer at Strategic Cyber Ventures. "Based on our many discussions with E8's executives and customers and hands-on evaluation of their technology, we're confident E8 will quickly replace a number of cybersecurity controls currently on the market and enhance others that established security teams rely on today. Strategic Cyber Ventures is honored this group of cybersecurity entrepreneurs, with a product that will revolutionize the industry, chose to join our growing portfolio and partner with our team of experts."
Adversary success rates, and the vast operational damage ripple-effect, continue to soar at all-time highs across all industries and business types. Organizations have come to the stark realization that the significant shortage of skilled IT security professionals, coupled with reliance upon largely siloed, signature-based methods of threat detection, is no longer acceptable. They are now embracing different approaches that incorporate advances in machine learning for cybersecurity and the significant automation benefits that these technologies create and enable.
Indicative of this growing trend, Gartner's April 2016 "Market Trends: User and Entity Behavior Analytics Expand Their Market Reach," authored by Eric Ahlm and Avivah Litan, is summarized as "Using analytic sciences to detect a threat is a common theme rippling through various security markets." In the research note, "Gartner predicts that by 2020, 60% of enterprise information security budgets will be allocated for rapid detection and response approaches, up from less than 20% in 2015." In addition, "Gartner predicts that the expansion in use cases for UEBA and the need to better respond to found events will both be critical drivers in UEBA market expansion and market collision. Both of these driving forces will follow the model for advanced analytics, specifically along the two analysis functions: descriptive and prescriptive."
The E8 Security Behavioral Intelligence Platform takes an 'inside-to-outside' view, with lateral movement modeling of user and endpoint activities; in addition to network traffic patterns originating from within an organization's perimeter, in order to identify the various stages of threat activity inside the network. Its self-learning, multi-dimensional behavioral analytics examines all user, endpoint and network activities, and provides a comprehensive view of unknown threat indicators within the organization to eliminate the siloed view of an organization's security posture.
"As a result of demonstrated motivation, the level of persistence and sophistication, and the unfortunate success rates that the adversaries continue to exhibit in their ongoing efforts to steal a company's coveted digital assets or disrupt operations, we have hit an inflection point where companies can no longer afford to take the same static approach with regard to detecting threats inside of their networks," said Bob Ackerman, Founder and Managing Director, Allegis Capital. "We are in complete alignment with E8 Security in our belief that behavioral intelligence must become an integral part of security operations, and that identifying unknown threat indicators through automation and machine learning is the way of the future. We are both excited and proud to extend our commitment to E8 Security."
"We are very pleased to welcome Strategic Cyber Ventures to the E8 Security family as an investor who joins in our mission of making existing enterprise cybersecurity functions smarter by using behavior intelligence and context to strengthen an organization's overall security posture," said Matt Jones, CEO, E8 Security. "We would also like to thank all of our existing investors who continue to embrace our vision and demonstrate it through their expanded commitments in this round of funding."
For additional information regarding the funding, please visit the E8 Security blog, as well as the Strategic Cyber Ventures blog.
About E8 Security
E8 Security is transforming security operations by dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to identify unknown cyber threats inside the network. Most organizations spend too much time, and money, investigating alerts that are scattered across multiple management systems, missing the patterns of compromise. Our behavioral intelligence platform can measure an organization's risk to a data breach and identify the early warnings signs when critical resources are being targeted. In short, we are helping security teams to detect, hunt, and respond by recognizing what is normal in their network so they can quickly respond to what is not. E8 Security is headquartered in Silicon Valley and is funded by Strategic Cyber Ventures, March Capital Partners, Allegis Capital, and The Hive. For more information, please visithttp://e8security.com/ and follow E8 Security on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit the company blog.
