Pcysys raises $25 million for automated cybersecurity testing

Cybersecurity startup Pcysys today closed a $25 million funding round, bringing its total raised to around $40 million. A spokesperson told VentureBeat the funds will help expand the company’s sales and delivery teams in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific and accelerate development of its technology.

According to a 2019 report from Positive Technologies, attackers can breach the network perimeter of half of all companies in a single step. Around 75% of penetration vectors reportedly arise from poor web resource protection. Attempts to breach the perimeter and obtain access to resources are successful in 92% of external penetration tests.

Pcysys was founded in 2015 by Arik Liberzon, Arik Faingold, and a group of former Israel Defense Force cyber researchers and cyber warfare specialists. The company says its solution curbs cyber threats through an automated, continuous network penetration testing platform that can be run remotely or on-premise in alignment with the MITRE ATT&CK framework. (MITRE ATT&CK is an industry-standard knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques.)

Pcysys’ platform, which doesn’t require installation or network reconfiguration, uses algorithms to scan and “ethically” attack enterprise networks. It performs exploits like remote execution, password cracking, malware injection, and privilege escalation without disrupting service to enable the retesting and validation of novel remediating actions. A dashboard shows steps in simulated attack vectors, as well as a summary of recommended mitigation steps, along with configuration options to run tests daily, weekly, or whenever network changes occur.

Since Pcysys’ market debut in mid-2018, Liberzon says it has experienced “substantial” revenue growth year-over-year, though he declined to quantify that growth when reached via email. The company has 60 employees worldwide (it expects to hire another 80 employees within a year) and 150 enterprise customers across more than 15 industries, including banking, insurance, investment, management, health care, retail, and energy.

Insight Partners led the series B round, with participation from existing investors Awz Ventures and the Blackstone Group. Pcysys had previously raised $14 million across series A and seed funding rounds.

Approximately $6 trillion will be spent globally on cybersecurity tools and R&D by 2021, according to Juniper Research, and Pcysys has plenty of rivals. Ironscales employs AI and machine learning to defeat organization-wide phishing attacks in real time, and France- and Boston-based Vade recently raised $79 million to further develop its filtering stack that protects against compromise, malware, and spam. There’s also Tessian, which uses machine learning to secure enterprise mail, and Valimail, which nabbed $45 million last year to thwart email phishing attacks.