Israeli startup Morphisec, which develops cyber security prevention and detection tools, has closed a $7 million Series A funding round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), GE Ventures, Deutsche Telekom, Portage Advisors llc., and OurCrowd. The company has raised $8.5 million to date, including this financing round.
Morphisec’s patented suite of security defense tools protects enterprises against targeted and zero-day attacks utilizing the concept of polymorphism - in other words, by turning attackers’ tactics back on themselves. This innovative security method provides enterprises with the ability to detect attacks earlier than ever before, to block them, and to create fingerprint information of attacks.
The company was launched in 2014 in JVP Cyber Labs in Beer Sheva, based on patented technology originating out of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and will come out of stealth mode this quarter. Proceeds of the round will be used to launch Morphisec’s flagship product and expedite the growth of marketing and sales in North America and Europe. Behind the company are highly experienced IT figures including Prof. Yuval Elovici, head of Ben-Gurion University's Cyber Laboratories, Dudu Mimran, technological director of Deutsche Telekom Labs Israel, and Mordechai Guri, a senior researcher at Ben-Gurion University's Cyber Laboratories.
Morphisec CEO Ronen Yehoshua said, “The strategic investment by GE Ventures, Deutsche Telekom and other leading financial groups demonstrates the value of our unique cyber security offering for a broad range of environments from endpoints, to servers, gateways and to cloud security. We are already seeing great traction with enterprises and global channels, and this investment will allow us to expedite the sales and marketing of our flagship product in the US and Europe."
JVP partner Yoav Tzruya said, "By turning attackers’ tactics back on themselves, Morphisec provides a game-changing technology in the enterprise security segment. It provides a unique offering that fulfills a major market need for protection against both known and zero-day attacks. The market is over-saturated with detection technologies that are less-than-perfect in their detection rates and entail significant run-time and management overhead for enterprises. Morphisec offers just the opposite. We see the company's early customer adoptions as a testament to the strength of the Israeli cyber-security sector and the innovation that drives it."
GE Digital Ventures and Business Development head Brett May said, "As millions of machines are connected to the Industrial Internet platforms, application security against targeted attacks is critical. Morphisec assists companies that run highly sensitive industrial equipment to secure their assets with minimal performance penalties or operational disruptions. We are excited to support Morphisec and its continued product innovation." Deutsche Telekom IT Security head Thomas Tschersich said, “We come across a lot of new technologies and are always willing to ‘kick the tires’ to find out if it can live up to its hype. As part of our due diligence, our team has tested the Morphisec product and found a very stable, unobtrusive, simple and effective solution. We threw at it every exploit we had, and it detected them all, with no false positives. We believe our investment will help Morphisec accelerate its coverage and footprint for desktop, server and cloud environments.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on October 6, 2015
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