Keep Aware: Browser Security Company Closes $2.4 Million In Funding

By Dan Anderson • Jun 9, 2023

Keep Aware – a company that is pioneering a human-centric approach to browser security – announced a $2.4 million round led by LiveOak Venture Partners with participation from Runtime Ventures and prominent angel investors in the cybersecurity industry. And Keep Aware will use the funding round to accelerate product development and establish go-to-market programs, enabling it to support its growing customer base and keep up with surging demand.

Keep Aware essentially combines the analysis of how information is presented to people, and how they interact with it, to create a human-centric solution that prevents threats at the point-of-click. And while traditional and technology-based security solutions are designed to prevent attacks from machine processes, events, and connections, Keep Aware focuses on threats that directly target people where they work, the web browser.

Plus Keep Aware embeds security directly into the user interface and operates in the considerable gray area where, without context, the risk level of any specific activity may be unclear. And when a threat is detected, Keep Aware immediately involves both the employee and security team in its resolution by assessing intent and alerting them to suspicious and dangerous actions. This inclusive process protects an organization in real time while also empowering employees to make more informed decisions in the future about security risks encountered in their daily work. Plus Keep Aware deploys directly to industry-standard browsers, and integrates seamlessly into an employee’s existing workflow.

Keep Aware’s browser security platform has quickly become a top priority for organizations of all types and sizes, primarily due to the following reasons:

— The browser is a blind spot to traditional security solutions, which leaves the employee vulnerable to attack. And typical threat detection technologies wrap around the browser, but don’t effectively analyze what happens within.

— As organizations are adopting more SaaS and cloud services, the browser is increasingly becoming where employees do the majority of their work. And information workers can spend 90% of their work day in a web browser accessing sensitive data and systems.

— Bad actors know all this and have made the browser a primary attack vector. And attacks are increasing in both velocity and sophistication. Up to a third of all data breaches involve a web browser. Plus the proliferation of AI tools like ChatGPT will lead to an even greater number of novel attacks.

Keep Aware is offering a private and efficient method for comprehensive browser security. And by deploying directly to the browser and involving the user in the entire process, Keep Aware prevents both known and unknown threats from suspicious links, emails, social media, and browser extensions.

Keep Aware recognizes the crucial roles of both people and technology in security management, fostering a culture of shared responsibility and collective ownership throughout any organization. The key features and benefits include:

— Native Protection Against Credential Theft, Social Engineering, and Malicious Extensions

— Behavior-based Risk Identification

— Security at the Point of Click

— Automated Investigations

— Logging for Auditing and Compliance

— Direct Deployment to All Standard Web Browsers

KEY QUOTES:

“The web browser has become the new Operating System for most of our work, yet security teams have near zero visibility into what happens within it and employees continue to face a barrage of threats. Keep Aware is uniquely positioned to prevent attacks that leverage the browser. Their solution fills this visibility gap and provides an innovative approach to prevent sophisticated phishing and social engineering threats.”

— Creighton Hicks, Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners

“Keep Aware began with the realization that no matter how advanced our security technology became, or how strong a perimeter we could establish, threats still find a way to the user, I began to understand that while a technology-based, perimeter-focused solution is still critically important, it was no longer sufficient. To effectively protect an organization in a continually evolving threat landscape, we have to better understand how people interface with technology, and the browser is the first key step.”

— Ryan Boerner, CEO and Founder at Keep Aware

“Even with the latest network and email security solutions in place, we were still finding that user-facing threats were going undetected. When we deployed Keep Aware, to over 700 people within minutes, the results were immediate. As Keep Aware delivers real-time threat detection and prevention directly in the browser, it quickly enhanced the prevention of sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks against our workforce, by detecting hundreds of threats and significantly reducing our team’s time to investigate.”

— Le Lu, CIO of One Workplace