Microsoft Venture Fund, USVP invest in Israel cyber security startup Hunters

Israel-based tech startup Hunters has raised $15 million in Series A funding to scale its autonomous threat hunting solution to defend enterprises from intruders and missed attacks across cloud, network, endpoint and more.

Investors include Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Silicon Valley high-tech venture investor U.S. Venture Partners, with participation by seed investors YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital, and Okta Ventures, the venture arm of publicly traded enterprise identity leader, Okta. This new investment brings the total funding to date to $20.4 million.

Just 18 months after its inception, Hunters is shipping its SaaS-based autonomous threat hunting product to customers that include Snowflake and TripActions, via direct sales and through partner channels like the CrowdStrike Store, and Snowflake Partner Connect.

Hunters.AI, the company’s platform, addresses the problem of missed attacks by autonomously detecting attack techniques and correlating them across a multitude of surfaces. Hunters will use the funds to deepen its ongoing ML R&D and further enable customers to extend threat detection with best-of-breed security components.

Industry analysts acknowledge that single-point solutions cannot effectively defend against multi-pronged attacks. Furthermore, the pace and scale of threats outstrip human-led detection and response, and overwhelm SOC team triage with a deluge of alerts and false-positives. This is why the industry is turning toward Extended Detection & Response (XDR) that cuts across all attack surfaces and reduces alert noise.

Hunters’ unique XDR capability picks up weak threat signals hiding in the noise and connects them across sparse and siloed data sources. Its broad, independent ecosystem allows customers to utilize existing security solutions and organizational data sources to detect more threats, faster.

 By connecting to a wide array of raw data and integrating telemetry across the IT stack, Hunters.AI applies its TTP-based intelligence (tactics, techniques and procedures) to surface potential attack signals, maps them to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and automatically analyzes, enriches and correlates massive volumes of data. It then delivers high confidence attack findings to expedite response by SOC teams, while significantly reducing alert fatigue and false warnings.

Hunters was recently recognized in Gartner’s March 2020 “Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response” report. The report notes, that extended detection and response describes a unified security incident detection and response platform that automatically collects and correlates data from multiple proprietary security components.

Mony Hassid, General Manager and Managing Director of EMEA, M12: “To overcome today’s cyber threat landscape, enterprise CISOs need to think like attackers in order to anticipate their moves, and they need to do it at scale. By automating the threat hunting process, Hunters addresses both needs. Hunters has an exceptionally strong team with an intimate understanding of attacker techniques, which is critical in this business.”

Dr. Jacques Benkoski, Partner U.S. Venture Partners: “USVP strives to identify market opportunities created by applying novel technology approaches to well understood customer pain points and Hunters XDR is a perfect example. We see an exploding market opportunity in Hunters with its unique ability to derive strong insights from correlation of small signals across diverse telemetry. The company's emphasis on integration with best-of-breed security systems enables easy customer adoption and the autonomous nature of the system dramatically simplifies detection of ongoing attacks while at the same time reducing the load on overburdened security teams.”

Uri May, co-founder and CEO, Hunters co-founder and CEO: “The Series A investment validates the tremendous progress we’ve made on the technical front with ML and threat research, and commercially with cybersecurity ecosystem partners. We are excited to join the impressive portfolios of M12 and USVP and to be able to leverage the support, experience and networks of these top U.S. venture firms. The participation of cloud-native, enterprise identity leader Okta, via Okta Ventures, is an additional significant vote of confidence in the value Hunters brings to the cybersecurity ecosystem.”

www.hunters.ai

www.m12.vc