US and Israel-based cybersecurity company Sepio Systems, has raised a $6.5 million in Series A funding round led by Hanaco Ventures and Merlin Ventures, with the participation of existing investors Energias de Portugal (EDP), Mindset Ventures and Pico Partners. Since its establishment Sepio Systems has raised $11 million.
In conjunction with the financing, Sepio also announced the appointment of two new executives to its management team: Gili Sahar joins as Chief Financial Officer and Chen Ben Eliyahu takes as Vice President of Business Development.
Sepio offers the world's first end-to-end solution that detects and mitigates hardware-based attacks, rogue peripherals, invisible network devices, and manipulated firmware. The company's Sepio Prime, which is a software-only solution, has been successfully deployed in over 25 banks, insurance, and telecom companies in the U.S., Singapore, Brazil, South Africa and Israel.
Rogue device cyber-attacks are rapidly growing as demonstrated by CNBC's recent report on ATM attacks and the serious data breach in NASA, whose Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was hacked through the use of an unauthorized Raspberry Pi Computer.
"The increasing number of hardware based cyber-attacks is a major concern to all enterprises. While all other security solutions are focused on software threats, they are incapable of stopping threats coming from hardware", said Yossi Appelboum, co-founder and CEO of Sepio Systems, Inc.
"Sepio defines and solves a problem most enterprises know they have but cannot quantify or resolve," explains Alon Lifshitz, Founding Partner at Hanaco Ventures. "Besides creating the Rogue Device Mitigation category, it's rare as an investor to back founders that have worked as a team for over twenty years now building their third startup together."
"Partnering with Hanaco and Merlin and the continuous support from our existing investors highlights the industry reception to our solution. This major investment allows us to grow faster, increasing marketing and sales activities and engineering resources," added Mr. Appleboum.
Merlin's partnership with Sepio includes bringing its Rogue Device Mitigation solution to market in the US Federal space. "As soon as we saw Sepio, we realized it was filling a critical gap in supply chain security by extending network visibility down to the physical layer. Our model is to invest in differentiated cybersecurity technology that we can bring to market to solve our customers' most difficult challenges, and we see Sepio as the perfect fit," added David Phelps, Chairman and CEO of Merlin.
As part of its expansion, Sepio is opening a new office in Mclean, Virginia for supporting the US federal customers.
About Hanaco Ventures
Hanaco Ventures is a New York and Tel Aviv based Venture Capital fund that invests in the most promising start ups from the Israeli ecosystem. Hanaco partners with Israeli companies, wherever they are in the world, helping them become category leaders beloved by their customers.
www.hanacovc.com
About Merlin Ventures
Merlin Ventures invests in emerging technologies to create enterprise ready products that protect government and commercial organizations. Merlin offers a broad portfolio of solutions that secure the enterprise from endpoints to networks, from governance to risk management, from infrastructure to information. Combining solutions with deep industry expertise and experience, Merlin delivers the cybersecurity solutions that organizations need to protect their most critical business assets while furthering their mission.
www.merlincyber.com
About Sepio Systems
Sepio is disrupting the cyber-security industry by uncovering hidden hardware attacks. Sepio Prime provides security teams with full visibility into their hardware assets and their behavior in real time. A comprehensive policy enforcement module allows administrators to easily define granular device usage rules and continuously monitor and protect their infrastructure. Leveraging a combination of physical fingerprinting technology together with device behavior analytics, Sepio's software-only solution offers instant detection and response to any threat or breach attempt coming from a manipulated or infected element.
