Recorded Future, a Somerville, Mass. cyber-threat intelligence firm, had a happy Halloween.
Capping an active month in cybersecurity funding, the company announced on Oct. 31 that it had secured $25 million in a Series E round of financing Insight Venture Partners. The venture capital firm has a history of funding security startups, including Cylance, DarkTrace and Firemon.
Recorded Future plans to use the money to fund its research, machine learning technologies and a planned expansion into new markets for its SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering. “With this cash infusion provided by Insight Venture Partners, we will be able to supercharge our efforts to explore new solutions to the issues plaguing the cybersecurity industry both today and in the future,” added Christopher Ahlberg, CEO and co-founder of Recorded Future, in a statement.
In addition to using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help businesses thwart cyber-attackers, the company monitors one of the most covert areas of the internet: the dark web. Home to illicit content and marketplaces, attackers routinely trade exploits on the dark web.
Recorded Future uses real-time intelligence collected on the dark web, among other sources, to help businesses stay ahead of publicly unknown threats and potential breaches. Earlier this year, Recorded Future’s chief data scientist Bill Ladd illustrated why keeping an eye on the dark web is an effective method of getting ahead of emerging threats.
“Adversaries aren’t waiting for NVD [NIST’s National Vulnerability Database] release and preliminary CVSS [Common Vulnerability Scoring System] scores to plan their attacks. The race typically starts with the first security publication of a vulnerability,” noted Ladd in a blog post.
“This propels activity in the adversary community and from that point, the race is between those developing and deploying the patches or the exploits,” continued Ladd. “We often see reposts of researcher reports directly into deep and dark web sources. They may even be translated, for example, into Russian on Russian criminal forums. POC [proof of concept] code is discussed, posted, sold.”
Recorded Future joins a long list of cybersecurity companies to land new VC funding in October 2017.
They include ShiftLeft ($9.3 million), Attivo Networks ($21 million) and Averon ($8.3 million). On the high end, Both Contrast Security and KnowBe4 scored $30 million apiece and Duo Security raised a $70 million in a Series D funding round.
