Strong and smart security operations teams are at the heart of any cybersecurity strategy, and today a startup that builds tooling to help keep them on their toes is announcing some funding on the back of a lot of growth. Pentera — which has built a system that launches simulations of network attacks to stress test software and human response — is announcing $60 million in funding, a Series D that values the Boston-based, Tel Aviv-founded startup at over $1 billion.
The funding will be used for M&A and to continue developing its product, CEO Amitai Ratzon said in an interview.
Pentera is a play on the term “pen testing”, which is short for penetration testing, programs that have been devised to help drill security teams on potential attack techniques. This is effectively what Pentera has built to an elaborate degree in a product that is officially described as “automated security validation.”
“We provide enterprises and governments a technology that, with a click of a button, can launch a mega attack against themselves, and with another click, the genie goes back into the bottle,” said Ratzon. “The beautiful thing is that it’s all safe by design.”
And in contrast to, say, a fire drill in an office, Pentera’s simulated attacks are carried out in a way where the rest of the organization outside of the security team is none the wiser — not unlike a lot of real-world security breaches in fact.
The round is coming on the heels of Pentera growing customers by 200% to 1,100 organizations and ARR by 300% in the last four years, underscoring the demand in the market for its tools.
Evolution Equity Partners is leading the round, with Farallon Capital participating. Prior to this, the company had raised $190 million in a combination of primary and secondary equity, according to PitchBook. Its other investors include Insight, K1 and Blackstone.
Pentera’s rise is coming at a time of a lot of automation in the world of cybersecurity.
The world of cybersecurity has been virtually ambushed by the arrival of AI, which is used both by malicious hackers to breach systems, and also by a wide array of tools to help identify and stop those attacks in their tracks.
Pentera takes this swing in AI into account as part of its platform. When it launches attacks, it does so around specific vulnerabilities and in the process identifies the different areas in an organisation’s network that might be exploited.
Typically, this could throw up as many as 10,000 alerts, Ratzon said.
To be fair, an overwhelming number of alerts in live products is a classic issue with a lot of security tooling, and a number of startups are tackling that problem, too. In the case of Pentera, it automatically takes that 10,000 and whittles it down to six or eight root causes or exploitable vulnerabilities, he said, and then provides suggestions for how to fix them, and then leaves that to the teams to handle.
“Pentera has redefined enterprise security testing and validation practices,” said Richard Seewald, managing partner at Evolution Equity Partners, in a statement. “Pentera’s exceptional growth, strong enterprise adoption, and category-defining innovation make it the clear leader in Automated Security Validation. We are proud to lead this investment and continue our relationship with Pentera as it scales globally, expands its technology, and continues to set the industry standard for security validation.”