Cyber intelligence company IntSights has announced the closing of its fourth financing round, in which it raised $30 million. Qumra Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Glilot Capital, ClearSky Security, Blackstone Group, Blumberg Capital, and Tola Capital. The current round brings the total raised by IntSights to $70 million.
CEO Guy Nizan, CTO Gal Ben David, and CPO Alon Arvatz, three veterans of IDF technological units, founded IntSights in 2015. The company, whose management is located in New York, and whose development center is in Tel Aviv, has a total of 160 employees. Following its latest financing round, IntSights announced that it planned to increase its staff in its development center, which currently has 100 employees.
IntSights is developing a cyber risk analysis system for large enterprises. The system is designed to provide intelligence on potential threats, analyze the possible attack methods, and automatically take appropriate defense measures. IntSights also has analysts working in Israel to provide service to supplement the system in finding new sources of information and examining attacks detected by the system. The company reports that it is currently serves over 275 customers, among them Blackstone, American Eagle, Teva, and Caesars Hotels.
"We realized that today, customers are very focused on taking advantage of their systems' capabilities, which means waiting to be attacked and then stopping it. We want to help customers be more proactive by gathering information from the darknet, various Telegram channels, and other online sources about attacks specifically aimed at them - for example, weaknesses in their systems, techniques for stealing information from their website, and tools for attacking their servers," Arvatz told "Globes."
"The darknet is a place where someone with very advanced attack capabilities can make a lot of money by selling the tools or techniques that he develops to people lacking these tools. On the one hand, this creates demand for tools like ours, and enables many more people to enter the circle of cybercrime. On the other hand, this circle feeds itself, and we're seeing growing demand all over the world for solutions in our cyber intelligence sphere among both customers and investors," Arvatz adds. "As of late 2019, our sales are in the tens of millions of dollars, and we're growing very rapidly in order to meet the high demand.
"Today, hackers can carry out an attack in a few hours, so we strongly emphasize shortening the time between detecting an attack and dealing with it. For example, if I detect a leak of employees' passwords, I change them. In this way, I can detect the threat, halt it, and make sure that the enterprise is protecting itself from end to end, all in half an hour.
"In the future, we want to connect intelligence on events to ways of dealing with them, so that we prevent the attack before it happens. To do that, we'll have to improve our ability to connect to the enterprise systems completely automatically and gather intelligence more strategically."
"In cybersecurity, we want to invest in platforms that address a widespread headache in a very large potential market. The cyber threat intelligence market in which the company operates is gaining more and more momentum, and I believe that it will become a huge market. I also believe that IntSights will become one of the most important companies in this market. IntSights looks for threats in places outside the enterprise, including the darknet, and makes a connection between external and internal threats. We looked at other companies in the field, and there's no doubt that IntSights provides the customer with a broad solution, not just one in a narrow niche," says Qumra managing director Boaz Dinte, who led the investment round in IntSights.
"The company grew several times over last year and by over 100% this year. It is without doubt one of the world's leading companies in this sector. The more automation it introduces, the lower its expense on analysts in relation to revenue. IntSights is one of those companies that has real potential for making a public offering," Dinte added.
What IntSights does: Intelligence gathering and cyber protection for enterprises
Founded: 2015
Founders: Guy Nizan, Gal Ben David, and Alon Arvatz
Employees: 160, including 100 in Israel
Offices: Headquarters in New York, development center in Tel Aviv
Capital raised: $70 million
Prominent investors: Qumra Capital, Glilot Capital, , ClearSky Security, and Blackstone Group
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 20, 2019
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