Photo: ZeroNorth
ZeroNorth, a Boston-based orchestrated risk management company, announced it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by ClearSky Ventures. Crosslink Capital, Rally Ventures and existing investor Petrillo Capital also participated in this round. Including this round, ZeroNorth has raised $18.6 million total.
With this funding round, it will enable ZeroNorth (formerly known as CYBRIC) to accelerate its newly extended focus on software and infrastructure risk management by strengthening research and development and investing in sales, marketing, and services to meet the growing demand for its platform. Some of the organizations that rely on ZeroNorth include Rodan & Fields, the University of Massachusetts, and Zerto for managing software and infrastructure risks.
“Proactively managing security and risk is about more than application security testing orchestration. Application vulnerability correlation and threat vulnerability management are important pieces of the puzzle that we’re delivering for customers grappling with the realities of digital transformation and managing risk in new environments,” said ZeroNorth CEO and founder Ernesto DiGiambattista. “We now have a broader focus that called for an expanded team and a new brand to match. With these pieces in place and the support of world-class investors, we’re ready to make proactive security a reality for organizations worldwide.”
ZeroNorth accelerates and scales proactive software and infrastructure risk management by continuously orchestrating the discovery and remediation of vulnerabilities. And its mission-control orchestration platform enables businesses to construct and manage an automated and consistent software security program. So the platform is able to provide visibility into business risk, the continuous proof of compliance, assurance of better security, and cost-effective risk management program.
In conjunction with this funding round, Peter Kuper and Patrick Heim of ClearSky Ventures and Art Coviello of Rally Ventures are joining Enrico Petrillo (Petrillo Capital) and DiGiambattista on ZeroNorth’s board of directors. ZeroNorth also announced it is welcoming John Steven as the new CTO of the company and Alan Deane as VP of worldwide sales.
Steven was a senior director at Synopsys, served as the co-CTO at Cigital, and was co-founder and CTO of Codiscope. And Steven is going to lead ZeroNorth’s technical direction for defining and delivering solutions that will enable organizations to improve security through their digital transformation journeys. ZeroNorth is going to have Steven worked with VP of engineering Andrei Bezdedeanu for driving innovation to the platform.
And Deane was most recently the VP of worldwide sales at DFLabs and spent 6 years as the VP of worldwide sales and field operations at Qumas. Plus hs also worked as the VP of sales-risk and compliance business unit at McAfee.
“Today every organization is in the software business. Software and the infrastructure it runs on are critical assets and continuous deployment is essential – but not at the expense of security,” added ClearSky Ventures managing director Peter Kuper. “ZeroNorth makes it possible for organizations to have both fast and secure production software – something that was considered incompatible before. Most importantly, ZeroNorth makes it possible for organizations to easily discover and remediate vulnerabilities without disrupting the software development process. Its orchestration platform will be critical to protecting this software-defined world and why we are so excited to be a supporter of this effort.”
Generally, companies rely on multiple scanning tools for identifying vulnerabilities in different phases of development, deployment, and operation. But each tool classifies vulnerabilities differently and it requires a dedicated employee for managing it. Plus relying on disconnected tools becomes expensive and difficult to staff amid a talent gap in cybersecurity. ZeroNorth fixes these issues by transforming the manual and siloed efforts into an orchestrated process.
“ZeroNorth gives us the visibility and assurance that we’re lowering risks to the organization. And it does so while reducing the staffing requirements for implementing and managing existing scanning tools and increasing their collective value,” explained Rodan & Fields VP of IT security and compliance Amit Bhardwaj. “ZeroNorth is an important partner that gives us confidence in our security posture.”
