Today, most fraud investigations end with an insinuation. Marc Willebeek-LeMair wants to get to the ground truth of the matter. On Wednesday, his cybersecurity startup Spyderbat announced it raised $4.2 million in funding. The Austin-based company plans to spend the seed cash on developing its tech, which aims to help risk analysts and chief information security officers (CISO) identify the past, present and future of security breaches to their computer systems.
“This is ground truth data of all the operations in your environment telling you what’s actually going on, good and bad,” Willebeek-LeMair told Built In. “And you map security events against that. And it gives you a very, very clear picture of what’s going on. That changes the game completely for these analysts.”
Currently, risk analysts must track security alerts manually, Willebeek-LeMair said, and they can receive up to 10,000 alerts per day. The sheer volume of alerts they receive is overwhelming, and forces them to quickly prioritize which are the most significant and investigate their origins. Once analysts do identify a cause of a breach, they can’t be sure if they’re correct, he added.
By constantly tracking and mapping every computer in a single environment’s operations, Spyderbat aims to weed out the false positives, identify which breaches are related and streamline the process of investigating claims.
The seven-person startup plans to release Spyderbat commercially by the end of the year. Once it is live, Spyderbat aims to sell to managed service providers, which will then sell Spyderbat’s services to their small- and medium-sized business customers. The startup also aims to directly market its product to “everybody in the Fortune 2000,” Willebeek-LeMair said.
“Cybersecurity is every company’s problem these days,” Willebeek-LeMair said. “Everybody’s a victim.”
As the startup grows, he added that its spotlight on customers’ complete operating environment could offer a new line of business. But for now, Spyderbat — named after the actual spiderbat animal, an homage to the large number of bats that swarm Austin and a play on the word “spy,” as well as a reference to the bats’ ability to identify objects in the dark, Willebeek-LeMair explained — will focus on cybersecurity. The company represents the third cybersecurity startup from co-founders Brian Smith and Willebeek-LeMair, who previously started and sold Click Security and TippingPoint.
“Cybersecurity is a problem that’s very hard to solve,” Willebeek-LeMair said. “The attackers shift their game and the defenders have to adjust their game. So, literally every year the threat landscape is evolving, and we need to figure out better ways to defend ourselves.”
LiveOak Venture Partners and Benhamou Global Ventures led the round, with participation from cybersecurity veteran John McHale.
