While TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 2022 is still fresh in our minds, Perigee, a member of the 2020 team, is helping companies secure their construction operations. It looks at things like HVAC, elevators and sensors; Keeping patches up to date and looking for vulnerabilities.
Today, the company announced a $4.75 million seed round and a full self-service phase, which will allow companies to launch products without having to deal with a sales team.
Molly Breen, a former NSA employee, developed the idea while a student at Harvard Business School. “Perigee is a lightweight, complete platform for IoT (Internet of Things) and OT (Operations Technology) devices,” Breen told TechCrunch.
She sees one of the company’s key differentiators as time to value. “We measure value in minutes, not months, and we’re holistic, so we’re bringing together many different security tools across the entire security stack, from threat detection to vulnerability detection.”
She says the tools she uses to protect her companies are difficult to track down. It leads to security blind spots that Perigee is trying to shed some light on.
“These blind spots we’ve seen over the past 24 months aren’t just isolated to HVAC equipment and security cameras. It actually applies to all devices. So every IoT-OT device has a physical presence managed by some non-security stakeholder, whether it’s a facilities or operations team member like an industrial engineer on the manufacturing floor or a clinical engineer on the hospital floor.
To help it go faster, the company has created a no-code workflow tool to automate common security tasks like patching. Automation can help facilitate coordination between these often complex construction and facilities operations and network and security teams to ensure these operations don’t fall between the cracks.
Image Credits: Perigee
Today, the product is managing 30,000 devices, and the startup has 7 employees. As a female founder, Breen says she can build a company that is particularly diverse, from the cap table to the board to the workforce.
In the year When we talked about her $1.75 million pre-seed round in late 2020, she said she was actively recruiting talent on LinkedIn, but realized it wasn’t a scalable strategy as the company grew.
“We’re looking at our pipeline and we’re looking at the metrics of diversity in it. And then I think having really real conversations internally about where we might be biased when we think about hiring. I like being in those rooms because I see myself as someone who can see biases, especially against women candidates, and we “I want to think about how we can make sure that we’re not. We’re not applying those biases to our pipeline,” she said.
Today’s seed round was led by Ballistic Ventures with the help of BBG Ventures, a firm that supports early-stage startups with female founders, and several industry angels. The company has raised $6.35 million to date.
