Censys: $15.5 Million Funding And New Scan Engine

By Amit Chowdhry • Aug 5, 2020
  • Censys — a leading Ann Arbor, Michigan-based cybersecurity company that offers Internet-wide continuous visibility and real-time risk assessment to help businesses monitor their constantly evolving attack surfaces and vulnerabilities — announced it has raised a $15.5 million Series A funding round

Censys — a leading Ann Arbor, Michigan-based cybersecurity company that offers Internet-wide continuous visibility and real-time risk assessment to help businesses monitor their constantly evolving attack surfaces and vulnerabilities — announced today it has raised a $15.5 million Series A round of financing from returning investors. This round was co-led by GV and Decibel and includes participation from Greylock Partners.

And Censys also announced that it has developed a new scan engine that sees 44% more of the Internet than any other cybersecurity company. This launch culminates two years of development based on the lessons learned by the team that originally built and maintains the open-source ZMap scanner.

This new architecture provides Censys Attack Surface Management customers with rapidly actionable findings, enumerating risks, and recommendations for remediation in order to protect against attackers and breaches. This new data will also be available to the public in the Censys Search Engine and Enterprise datasets later this year.

With this round of funding, Censys is planning to double its headcount within the next year. And it will hire key leadership roles and significantly expanding its sales and engineering teams.

KEY QUOTES:

“When we released ZMap seven years ago, it fundamentally changed researchers’ visibility into the hosts on the Internet, but it was never designed for continually tracking changing hosts or finding new services as soon as they came online. Our new architecture is a significant improvement over Censys’ original scan engine and enables our Attack Surface Management product to find vulnerable services as soon as they come online.”

— Censys co-founder and chief scientist Zakir Durumeric

“This raise enables us to invest aggressively in top security talent and global infrastructure as we move into the next stage of our company. We’re thrilled to have the support of world-class investors as we keep the momentum building and continue to revolutionize how businesses manage their security posture in an ever-changing environment.”

— Censys CEO and co-founder David Corcoran

“The Censys team has made substantial progress laying the groundwork for wide-scale internet scanning, and continues to deliver on its promise of providing better security with data. Led by the creators of ZMap, the Censys team provides unprecedented breadth, depth, and scale of risk assessment and visibility to information security practitioners at major enterprises.”

— Karim Faris, General Partner at GV

“Censys continuously scans the widest range of ports and protocols across the web to offer the world’s most complete view of the Internet – a necessity for any organization wanting to have a true system of record of all their Internet-facing assets and total visibility into the risks they pose.”

— Jon Sakoda, founding partner at Decibel

“You can’t protect what you can’t see — but in today’s dynamic IT environment, many organizations struggle to find, much less keep track of, every system and application at risk before the attackers do. Censys empowers defenders with the automated visibility they need to truly understand and to get ahead of these risks, enabling even small security teams to have an outsized impact.”

— Dug Song, Duo Security co-founder and Censys board member