ZecOps raises $10.2 million to automatically detect and remediate cyberattacks

Juniper Research pegs the number of digital records that will be stolen in 2023 at 33 billion, compared with the 12 billion stolen in 2018. As recently as 2017, the U.S. outranked all other countries in the volume of ransomware attacks, according to Symantec. And analysts elsewhere estimate that the cybercrime economy has grown to $1.5 trillion in annual profits and that damages will reach $6 trillion by 2021.

They’re exactly the cyber threat and remediation problems ZecOps was founded two years ago to address. The San Francisco startup, which just raised $10.2 million in seed funding, is the brainchild of CEO Zuk Avraham, previously chairman of mobile security firm Zimperium, and former CloudFlare engineer Taly Slachevsky. “Since our inception in 2017, our mission has been to detect attackers’ mistakes that go unnoticed by all the other defense controls and hence to provide organizations with an immediate view on who is targeted, which assets are already infected, and automatically generate threat intelligence on the attacks,” he added.

ZecOps’ secret sauce is a proprietary tech stack that enables automated detection, analysis, and response to cyberattacks on endpoints and servers. Specifically, it exploits mistakes made by attackers to pinpoint affected machines and generate threat intelligence. Avraham says it’s designed to extend to internet of things devices without requiring any sort of recertification, and he notes that because it’s agentless, it only takes minutes to deploy on average without prerequisites to speak of.

ZecOps’ product suite evidently impressed the First International Bank of Israel, which is among its first customers. Others include managed tech service provider Trace3; telecommunications companies KPN, SmarTone, and Swisscom; and undisclosed carriers, governments, and defense agencies in North America, Europe, and Asia.

“We have been very impressed with ZecOps’ capability to automate security breach detection, analysis and response for the most commonly used operating systems,” said executive vice president and managing director at KPN Ventures Herman Kienhuis. “We see great potential in enabling more organizations to learn from attacks, generate new threat intelligence and substantially improve their security posture. The traction that ZecOps has generated in the past few months, while being still in stealth mode, is very promising. We look forward to working with the company to help it achieve its ambitious goals.”

Spurred on by the threat of hacks and data breaches, the global cybersecurity market is expected to grow from $152 billion in 2018 to $250 billion by 2023. There’s plenty of competition to go around, like San Francisco-based Corelight, which recently raised $50 million to monitor networks; RedSeal, which nabbed $60 million for its suite of cyber-risk modeling software; and Denver-based security operations management software provider Swimlane, which this year closed a $23 million round.

ZecOps’ seed funding comes from CEAS Investments, Evolution Equity Partners, KPN Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Stormbreaker Venture Group, and a number of angel investors. Avraham said the capital infusion will further advance the company’s platform and grow its team around the world.