Vulcan Cybera company that develops software to help businesses detect vulnerabilities in their software stack, today announced that it has raised $55 million in equity funding led by Maor Investments and Ten Eleven Ventures with participation from Dawn Capital and Wipro Ventures.
The investment comes at a precarious time for the cybersecurity industry. Cyber VC funding is on pace to hit a four-year low. according on Crunchbase, cybersecurity startups raised about $1.9 billion in the third quarter of 2023, down 30% from $2.7 billion in the year-ago period.
Co-founder and CEO Yaniv Bar-Dayan attributes Vulcan’s financial success to its growth. In the 12 months to the third quarter, the company’s revenue more than doubled, he said, while its customer base grew to more than 200 companies — 60 of which are “enterprise-sized.”
“Vulcan Cyber will use funds from this round to fuel continued product innovation, expand into new markets, accelerate rapid revenue growth and strengthen market momentum,” Bar-Dayan told TechCrunch in an email interview — noting that the new cash boosts Vulcan’s overall revenue. to 70 million dollars.
It probably also helped Vulcan that software vulnerabilities are a growing business threat. According Statista, in 2022 internet users around the world discovered over 25,000 new common IT security vulnerabilities and exposures, the highest annual rate reported to date.
Vulcan, which Bar-Dayan co-founded in 2018 with Tal Morgenstern and Roy Horev, provides a suite of tools to help address — and prioritize — risks around code vulnerabilities. The platform monitors security, IT and DevOps software via APIs to identify potential exploits and initiate remediation, either automatically or under the supervision of a company’s security team.
Vulcan Cyber’s user interface.
Vulcan leverages a threat intelligence network to inform its suite’s alert and detection policies, Bar-Dayan says. And OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses large language models to “build restorative intelligence” (although it’s not clear to this author what exactly that means).
“Hephaestus [models] attack paths from code in the cloud to traditional network infrastructure [and] prioritizes vulnerability remediation for assets based on exposure to attacks [and more,] and then correlates the connections between the software that needs to be patched,” Bar-Dayan said. “The platform democratizes cyber risk remediation with automated task assignment, asset ownership management and risk exclusion workflows.”
Now, a growing number of startups offer tools to scan codebases, tools, and software packages for security vulnerabilities, including SonarSource (which recently raised $412 million), Socket ($20 million), and BluBracket ($12 million) . So what sets Vulcan apart? Bar-Dayan points to the company’s free offering, Vulcan Free, which launched last year — and which he believes is one of the only no-cost, risk-based vulnerability management products on the market.
Of course, Vulcan is in the business of making money. Vulcan Free serves as a conduit for Vulcan’s fully managed products.
“The industry doesn’t need more scanners and vulnerability management tools,” Bar-Dayan said. “We need holistic, action-oriented cyber risk management that addresses and remediates real business risk and helps maximize investments in data generation tools. Vulcan Cyber is on a mission to eliminate these challenges and own the cyber risk management market and change the vulnerability management market for good.”
Vulcan currently employs a team of approximately 90 people. Bar-Dayan would not commit to hiring plans, but said the goal is to grow the number of employees “gradually” with the business.
