Blue Hexagon Announces Real-Time, Deep Learning Platform for Network Threat Protection

PRESS RELEASE

Sunnyvale, Calif, February 5, 2019 --- Blue Hexagon, adeep learning innovator focused on protecting enterprises from cyberthreats, launched today with $31M in funding from Benchmark and Altimeter, and unveiled the industry’s first real-time, deep learning cybersecurity platform for network security.

Blue Hexagon is proven in customer environments to detect known and unknown network threats at first encounter—with speed, efficacy, and coverage that sets a new standard for cyber defense. In fact, the platform demonstrated nearly 100% detection rates against daily malware samples, including zero day malware variants, automatically delivering a verdict and blocking threats in sub-seconds.

The company was founded by two renowned machine learning and security experts: CEO Nayeem Islam and CTO Saumitra Das. Islam is former head of Qualcomm R&D while Das, former engineering leader at Qualcomm, is a prolific inventor with 330 worldwide and 125 U.S. patents granted, and an additional 450 patents pending. The Blue Hexagon team also includes threat researchers and deep learning experts who were responsible for category-defining products at FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, and Amazon.

“With four new, unique malware samples released every second, traditional security methods can’t keep pace with the speed and scale of hacker innovation,” Islam said. “A new approach is needed, and recent advancements in deep learning make it the ideal technology to address the velocity and volume of attacks. Blue Hexagon is applying our expertise in deep learning to detect network threats at all times, in sub-seconds, and at wire speed.”

“To stay ahead of adversaries, we’re always looking for some of the most innovative solutions in the market. We’ve been incredibly impressed by the Blue Hexagon deep learning technology and its ability to detect threats that bypassed existing security solutions,” said John Petersen, chief information officer, Heffernan Insurance Brokers.

“I have always thought security would be a great place to apply deep learning, and I’m excited to see Blue Hexagon doing just that in unique and groundbreaking ways,” said Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora.

Blue Hexagon has built their training infrastructure in collaboration with AWS, advancing the state-of-the-art in deep learning workloads for security. “The transformative power of deep learning is being applied to a range of important challenges from autonomous driving cars and image recognition to cancer imaging. It has the potential to transform cybersecurity as well. We’re delighted to be providing Blue Hexagon with the cloud infrastructure they need to bring this vision to reality,” said Mark Ryland, director of the office of the CISO, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Built with a proprietary neural network architecture, the Blue Hexagon platform inspects the complete network flow. Customers can benefit from:

● Speed of threat detection: The ability for Blue Hexagon to stop known and unknown threats in less than a second can translate to savings in the millions from prevention of breaches.

● Efficacy of detection: Blue Hexagon consistently delivers over 99.5% detection rates and very low false positives in efficacy tests performed with daily threat samples, reducing the need for SOC team investigation costs.

● Near real-time prevention: Blue Hexagon can be configured for near real-time prevention by orchestrating enforcement on endpoints, firewalls, and web proxies, to block malicious traffic at the network or application.

● Complete threat categorization and kill chain visibility: A comprehensive management dashboard features automatic neural network classification into threats found, including threat family information and indicators of compromise. Complete kill chain visibility into infected systems and hosts is generated in real-time for further analysis by security analysts.

● Ease of deployment: Blue Hexagon offers a network security platform priced and managed as a modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The platform works out-of-the-box, requiring no baselining or tuning, and features a unique usage-based pricing model. Any on-premises hardware deployment is right-sized for the network infrastructure but priced based on actual traffic inspected, enabling security teams to reduce capex expenditures.

“The state of the art for network security until now has been sandboxes and signatures. There hasn’t been a new approach to tackle the hundreds of thousands of malware variants that are created every day. Blue Hexagon changes the paradigm; their technology is a big leap forward in the arms race against the bad guys,” said Eric Vishria, General Partner at Benchmark.

“We invest in long-term partnerships with startups that have high growth potential. Blue Hexagon has the right team, technology, and vision to solve the massive cybersecurity challenges we’re facing today,” said Kevin Wang, Partner at Altimeter Capital.