CyCognito Secures $100M to Accelerate Next Evolution of Attack Surface Management

PRESS RELEASE

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA—DECEMBER 1, 2021—CyCognito today announced it has raised a $100 million Series C funding round led by The Westly Group—just 3.5 years after the company was founded in 2017. New investors Thomvest Ventures and The Heritage Group joined the round alongside existing investors Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sorenson Ventures and UpWest. This new financing round brings the company’s total amount raised to $153 million.

“Our number one priority is to provide global enterprises with world-class attack surface protection,” said Rob Gurzeev, CEO and co-founder, CyCognito. “That’s why we’ve developed the industry's most dynamic, intelligent platform for comprehensive external attack surface management. 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.”

A Modern Approach to Attack Surface Management & Protection

The CyCognito platform is the first external Attack Surface Management platform that delivers a complete solution to quickly prioritize, investigate, and respond to potential security risks. Leveraging the latest advancements in Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), the platform autonomously builds a graph data model that portrays an organization’s business structure—from the company’s name to the hundreds of departments, subsidiaries, acquisitions and brands an organization owns. The platform then scans billions of servers and devices across the Internet to contextualize and identify internet-exposed and unmanaged assets that could serve as entry points for attackers.

Several Fortune 500 companies, including Colgate-Palmolive, Tesco and Scientific Games Corporation, as well as government groups like the State of California, are using the CyCognito platform to autonomously discover, test and contextualize security threats before they happen.

“Protecting our partners and customers is important to us,” said Alex Schuchman

Chief Information Security Officer, Colgate-Palmolive Company. “CyCognito provides our company with cutting-edge technology, giving our team visibility into all our web-facing assets globally in an easy-to-use interface. CyCognito is superior to any other attack surface management tools we’ve used. This technology gives us the opportunity to effectively remediate the identified security risks and rapidly improve our company’s security posture.”

This round of financing comes on the heels of significant growth in revenue and customer adoption. In the last 12 months, the company generated 4x in new ARR and also grew its Fortune 500 customer roster by 3x—underscoring worldwide demand for its leading Attack Surface Management platform.

As the world evolves and businesses innovate, the need to protect critical infrastructure and attack surfaces becomes more critical,” said Steve Westly, Founder and Managing Partner, The Westly Group. “We represent many of the world’s largest energy and transportation companies. CyCognito’s next-gen approach to attack surface management couldn’t come at a better time, with virtually every organization making the shift to digital transformation and supporting remote and hybrid workforces. We believe CyCognito is the clear leader protecting businesses around the world with a comprehensive attack surface management platform.”

“We are thrilled to be an investor and part of the CyCognito family,” said Umesh Padval, Venture Partner at Thomvest Ventures. “Rob’s experience at Unit 8200 at the Israeli Intelligence thinking like an attacker and developing defenses, the comprehensive attack surface management platform CyCognito has developed that addresses a major pain-point for customers, and the strong team Rob has assembled are the key reasons for our investment in CyCognito."

ABOUT CYCOGNITO

CyCognito solves one of the most fundamental business problems in cybersecurity: seeing how attackers view your organization, where they are most likely to break in, what systems and assets are at risk and how you can eliminate the exposure. Founded by national intelligence agency veterans, CyCognito has a deep understanding of how attackers exploit blind spots and a path of least resistance. The Palo Alto-based company is funded by leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and its mission is to help organizations protect themselves from even the most sophisticated attackers. It does this with a category-defining, transformative platform that automates offensive cybersecurity operations to provide reconnaissance capabilities superior to those of attackers.