Fletch raises $12.5 million for NLP engine to scan cyber threat landscape 

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) cybersecurity vendor Fletch announced it has raised $12.5 million as part of a series A funding round led by venture capital firm True Ventures for a solution to scan the cyber threat landscape.

Fletch’s AI-powered solution uses an NLP engine to scan 10,000 articles a day to identify emerging threats, and processes an organization’s technology, geographic and industry exposure to better detect cyber threats and provide a risk profile for security teams to refer to in order to identify entry points in their app/tech stack. 

The announcement comes as organizations are struggling to keep up with an ever more demanding threat landscape, with cyberattacks increasing by 38% in 2022. 

“No person or team can keep up with all of the cyber threats emerging and evolving every day. With today’s technology, you’ll still be behind. Getting started with managing cyber threats requires purchasing enterprise technology, long implementation timelines, and large teams to reactively respond to cyber threats,” said Grant Wernick, CEO and cofounder at Fletch.

“These systems are designed for enterprise businesses that have the tools and teams in place to react to threats rather than help everyone see potential threats coming and know what to do,” Wernick said.

Fletch’s answer to this threat landscape is to gather news on emerging threats, as part of an approach the vendor claims enables organizations to identify major threats seven to 10 days before they hit the news cycle.

In fact, Wernick notes that last month Fletch was the first to publicize ”ChatGPT Data Leak and Redis Race Condition Vulnerability That Remains Unfixed – #CVE-2023-28858.”

The organization’s solution falls most comfortably into the artificial intelligence in cybersecurity market, which Grand View Research valued at $13.29 billion in 2021 and anticipate will grow 24.3% annually from 2022 to 2030. 

It’s competing against a range of established vendors in the market including Darktrace. Darktrace Prevent provides organizations with an AI-driven threat prevention solution that continuously monitors the attack surface, emulates attacks to test for potential vulnerabilities, and automatically identifies and prioritizes risks throughout a network. 

Fletch’s emphasis on helping organizations to detect threats before they hit the news cycle is its key point of differentiation from other providers in the market.