Autonomous Threat Hunting Solution Company Hunters Raises $15 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Jul 2, 2020
  • Hunters has announced that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. These are the details about the funding.

Hunters has announced that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding for scaling its autonomous threat hunting solution to defend enterprises from intruders and missed attacks across cloud, network, endpoint, etc. The investors in this round include Microsoft’s M12 venture firm and U.S. Venture Partners. Seed investors YL Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Okta also participated in the round. Including this round of funding, the company has raised $20.4 million.

After about 18 months after launching, Hunters is shipping its SaaS-based autonomous threat hunting product to customers that include Snowflake and TripActions via direct sales and through partner channels like the CrowdStrike Store and Snowflake Partner Connect. And Hunters.AI — which is the company’s platform — addresses the problem of missed attacks by autonomously detecting attack techniques and correlating them across a multitude of surfaces. With this round of funding, Hunters will deepen its ongoing ML R&D and further enable customers to extend threat detection with best-of-breed security components.

Industry analysts have acknowledged that single-point solutions cannot effectively defend against multi-pronged attacks. And the pace and scale of threats outstrip human-led detection and response, and overwhelm SOC team triage with a flood of alerts and false-positives. This is why the industry is turning toward Extended Detection & Response (XDR) that cuts across all attack surfaces and reduces alert noise.

Hunters’ unique XDR capability is able to pick up weak threat signals hiding in the noise and connects them across sparse and siloed data sources. And its broad independent ecosystem allows customers to utilize existing security solutions and organizational data sources to detect more threats faster.

And by connecting to a wide array of raw data and integrating telemetry across the IT stack, Hunters.AI applies its TTP-based intelligence (tactics, techniques, and procedures) to surface potential attack signals, maps them to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and automatically analyzes, enriches and correlates massive volumes of data. Then it delivers high confidence attack findings to expedite response by SOC teams, while significantly reducing alert fatigue and false warnings.

Key Quotes:

“The Series A investment validates the tremendous progress we’ve made on the technical front with ML and threat research, and commercially with cybersecurity ecosystem partners. We are excited to join the impressive portfolios of M12 and USVP and to be able to leverage the support, experience and networks of these top U.S. venture firms. The participation of cloud-native, enterprise identity leader Okta, via Okta Ventures, is an additional significant vote of confidence in the value Hunters brings to the cybersecurity ecosystem.”

– Uri May, Hunters co-founder and CEO.

“To overcome today’s cyber threat landscape, enterprise CISOs need to think like attackers in order to anticipate their moves, and they need to do it at scale. By automating the threat hunting process, Hunters addresses both needs. Hunters has an exceptionally strong team with an intimate understanding of attacker techniques, which is critical in this business.”

– Mony Hassid, General Manager and Managing Director of EMEA, M12

“USVP strives to identify market opportunities created by applying novel technology approaches to well understood customer pain points and Hunters XDR is a perfect example. We see an exploding market opportunity in Hunters with its unique ability to derive strong insights from correlation of small signals across diverse telemetry. The company’s emphasis on integration with best-of-breed security systems enables easy customer adoption and the autonomous nature of the system dramatically simplifies detection of ongoing attacks while at the same time reducing the load on overburdened security teams.”

– Dr. Jacques Benkoski, Partner at U.S. Venture Partners

“Okta’s mission is to enable any organization to securely use any technology. Today’s distributed organizations are faced with more security threats than ever before. Hunters’ diverse XDR ecosystem and unique detection technology offer our joint customers an integrated value, and a resilient security solution to help them overcome these challenges and increase their overall security posture.”

– Monty Gray, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at Okta