Insight Engines, the San Francisco-based startup known for its cybersecurity and threat intelligence gathering tool for Splunk, called Cyber Security Investigator, announced today that it had raised $15.8 million in a Series A round of financing.
Led by August Capital, the funding round was also backed by, Real Ventures, Data Collective, Splunk and its co-founder, Erik Swan. Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO of Bromium, is also an investor.
Insight Engines specializes in making big data easy to query and explore with natural-language processing technologies. In Cyber Security Investigator, IT professionals can detect and visualize cyberthreats by posing questions in plain-English.
“In today’s day and age, advisories are always changing their patterns of attack, making static alerts ineffective defense,” Grant Wernick, co-founder and CEO of Insight Engines, told eSecurity Planet. “CSI [Cyber Security Investigator] levels the playing field, allowing the good guys to be dynamic in ways they never imagined possible.”
Whether equipped with the skills of a seasoned IT experts or those of technology generalists, Cyber Security Investigator helps businesses that may be struggling to fill in their IT ranks quickly assess their security posture.
“CSI helps bridge the hiring chasm between the need for talented individuals and the work force available,” said Wernick. “CSI is a force multiplier for the most advanced security teams who can now achieve more effective results in a fraction of the time. With CSI we have been able to transform physical security staff to augment cyber security operations, which has resulted in both significant cost savings and fresh perspectives for the enterprise.”
Apart from its intuitive search capabilities, Cyber Security Investigator drastically reduces the time it takes to zero-in on security insights, added Wernick.
“CSI empowers analysts to escape search fatigue by helping them analyze more of their data and spend less time searching,” he said. They can “spend more time focused on mitigating real threats and significantly less time focused on crafting esoteric queries. Using CSI, analysts no longer need to be big data specialists and can focus back on defending against an ever-increasing threat landscape.”
Having already tackled cybersecurity analytics, arguably among the most complex types of intelligence to obtain, Insight Engines has now set its sights on other forms of information used by enterprises. Beyond security, the company plans to use its technology to make big data insights more easily attainable in the realms of application delivery, IT operations and business analytics, according to the company.
