Verity, a platform for strengthening cyber security infrastructure, today came out of private equity with $18.5 million in funding, $12 million from Insight Partners and a $6.5 million round led by NFX and Amit. According to CEO Adi Icahn, the newly raised capital is being used to improve Verity’s business operations and develop its product portfolio.
Verity’s launch comes as VCs continue to show enthusiasm for cybersecurity startups despite a generally unfavorable funding climate. According to Pitchbook data, venture capital investments in the security sector this year exceeded $13.66 billion – the highest in 2018. Up from $11.47 billion in 2020. And the global cyber security market is estimated to exceed $500 billion by 2030.
In the year Founded in 2021 by Icahn and Oren Koren — both former Check Point executives — Verity integrates with the company’s existing security stack to assess threat posture by analyzing security configurations, logs, sensor telemetry and threat data. The platform taps AI to identify which events are likely to impact business hours and provide root cause, as well as which security policy improvements should be adopted to mitigate the impacts.
“Enterprise security posture is often sub-optimal. This is due to a number of factors, including device proliferation, increased complexity, large amounts of data and limited resources,” Coren told TechCrunch in an email interview. “That’s what inspired us to build the Verity platform — to solve these complex problems and help IT and security keep up with this challenge.”
Coren notes that Verity can increase the efforts of security teams by identifying security gaps, ultimately reducing time spent on monitoring and remediation efforts. The increasing number of security solutions in companies can introduce complexity, because each solution has its own functions and learning tools, he argues, but the number of alerts issued by the solutions creates a black visibility on the real security situation.
Coren is not exactly an unbiased source. But he’s not the only one who’s noticed these troubling trends in corporate security. A recent survey of more than 800 IT professionals found that nearly 60% received more than 500 cloud security alerts per day, and alert fatigue caused by voice caused 55% to miss critical alerts on a daily or weekly basis.
“The proliferation of security solutions creates an opening for misconfigurations that are leveraging a wide range of security capabilities, which can cause unintended security gaps and block legitimate applications and users, negatively impacting businesses,” Icahn said in an email. “Today’s IT and security leadership have a misconception about the proper use of security investments and the effective security posture of their organizations.”
Verity’s challenge demonstrates that its approach is superior to other security posture-analysis platforms on the market. Competing provider Secureframe offers integrated services with cloud providers and applications to understand its customers’ security posture. Hunters, another competitor, aims to automate the threat hunting process by taking data from network and security tools to detect hidden attacks.
It’s still early for Verity — Coren wouldn’t disclose the company’s customer base or current revenue. But Verity is betting that its technological know-how will help it stand out from the pack. “Using modern techniques like machine learning, with a focus on automation, we aim to provide a way for modern teams to raise their security posture while reducing issues that affect business uptime,” he said.
As the saying goes, time will tell.
