As bad actors equip artificial intelligence to exploit software vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed, companies are increasingly recognizing the need to strengthen their cyber defenses.
Fortunately, these same AI tools are also helping businesses fight back.
The need for such capabilities has helped Exaforcean artificial intelligence startup that detects and prevents real-time attacks, secures a $125 million Series B round. The round valued the three-year-old startup at $725 million and included HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures and Seligman Ventures.
The massive funding round comes just a year after Exaforce raised a $75 million Series Abringing its total funding to $200 million. The influx of capital underscores both the high cost of building and selling an AI-enabled security operations center (SOC) and the huge market opportunities investors see in the space.
Exaforce says it uses artificial intelligence agents, called “Exabots,” with deep data analysis to automate security operations, eliminating the heavy lifting of human analysts.
For the startup’s co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, the mission is simple: Apply artificial intelligence to catch and stop threats as they happen. “It’s a very simple command, but it’s very complicated to execute,” he said.
The real challenge for security teams is that the vast majority of threat alerts are false positives. “A security operations person gets hundreds of alerts. How do you know what’s a real high-priority alert?” said Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, comparing the work of security teams to looking for a needle in a haystack.
Exaforce claims its AI platform can reduce manual, time-consuming tasks by up to 90%.
Recognizing the rise of cyber attacks, the startup recently introduced “vibe hunting,” a feature that allows security teams to query the AI platform with natural language to investigate potential attacks based on simple hunches. “With vibe hunting, you can ask a very simple question like, ‘Have we received any new attacks from Iran?’ Singla said.
Exaforce officially brought its product to market in the fourth quarter of last year, after two years of testing with design partners. Since then, the startup has added 20 customers, including notable names like Replit and Guardant Health. Due to the increase in cyberattacks, Singla told TechCrunch that Exaforce expects to reach 40 to 50 customers by the end of the year.
The high-profile attacks have “overloaded our ability to reach customers because customers are now not asking, ‘Why do I need this?'” Singla said. The question he hears most often now is, “How do I make it work?”
Exaforce isn’t the only one applying AI to security operations. The company faces competition from startups such as 7AI, Dropzone AI and Prophet Security, as well as industry giants Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.
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