SOCRadar is one of the fastest-growing SaaS cyber security companies in the world as they are a pioneer of the Extended Threat Intelligence concept. Last month, the company raised $5 million in Series A funding. To learn more Pulse 2.0 interviewed Huzeyfe Önal, CEO and Co-founder at SOCRadar.
Huzeyfe Önal’s Background
After Önal graduated in computer engineering, he started working in the cybersecurity industry in 2000. After that, he experienced the field in different firms for over 10 years and decided to generate something new and unique, providing a better solution rather than the traditional cybersecurity approaches.
Önal has written over 50 publications about information technology and was rewarded by SourceFire for his work on Snot Attack Detection and Prevention Systems.
“Providing training with more than 1,000 companies led us to step into establishing our business in 2015. We started creating cybersecurity solutions with a completely new approach,” said Önal. “Since that day I have been involved in four different startups and SOCRadar is the latest one. With the other co-founder Ahmet Kurukose, we developed automation solutions in order to detect cyber threats in advance and produce alerts on time.”
The Idea Behind SOCRadar
Önal noted that the main purpose behind the idea is to democratize cyber threat intelligence and change the generally accepted, conventional security approaches. And since the team believes in developing systems that alert in advance and warn the user, they aim to prevent attacks before they happen. Simply put, as cyber threats expand, bad actors are targeting every organization regardless of the industry or size.
“Our goal was to make our approach the key solution against these attacks and provide an early warning system, contributing to the cybersecurity field with our new approach and systems,” Önal added. “The need for a cyber threat intelligence platform is very obvious in the industry. ‘The platform’ means a service that combines complementary services into a single software solution It must be user-friendly, automated, and cloud-based. I must say this is the Zeitgeist of the tech industry. What Ahmet and I are trying to do is integrate these principles into threat intelligence with breakthrough technology in an innovative way.”
Challenges Faced Building The Company
Önal pointed out that all of the computer science technology he saw before SOCRadar helped him pull together the roots of the company and the systems.
“But of course, some challenges that I faced put me in tough situations. Creating something new has always been a challenge, including the novel concept of Extended Threat Intelligence,” Önal recalled. “Since the threat intelligence concept was very recent at that time and without awareness of it, it was pretty difficult to make people accept it and required great effort for us. Showing and convincing small and medium-sized enterprises that threat intelligence is required for them, too, was a challenge. We moved forward with patience and started providing freemium usage.”
Core Products
SOCRadar is known as a SaaS platform that provides External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS), and Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) under one platform called Extended Threat Intelligence (XTI). The XTI platform serves customers in providing proactive security with a hacker mindset. And with XTI, SOCRadar enables organizations to maximize the efficiency of their security teams with false-positive, free, actionable, and contextualized threat intelligence.
“The advantage of experiencing XTI is that the platform has a user-friendly interface and can be controlled without setting up any third-party program in the customer system — you can just run it on your browser,” Önal explained. “All metrics, status, and management can be monitored on a dashboard with recurring alerts and the help of the SOCRadar analyst team.”
Biggest Milestones
I asked Önal about some of the company’s most noteworthy milestones. This is what Önal cited:
— Recognition by Gartner for Market Guide for Security Threat Intelligence Products and Services in May 2020 was especially important because just one year after they founded the company the success was recognized by a global tech consulting company.
— Tripling the growth in the year 2021 was also significant.
— Discovering one of the largest B2B leaks in recent years: “BlueBleed” in October 2022 should also be on the list.
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Önal about any specific customer success stories, he said that there are many cases that the team has experienced, but they are extremely sensitive about anonymity when it comes to cyber incidents.
“I’m not able to share any of these at the moment. But I can say that we alerted a considerable number of large-scale companies before they got attacked by ransomware groups and prevented possible million-dollar financial losses,” Önal noted.
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What is the TAM that SOCRadar is pursuing? Considering the product offerings, the company is able to meet the External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Digital Risk Protection Service (DRPS), and Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) needs of enterprises of all sizes.
“According to recent reports, the EASM, DRPS & CTI markets are estimated to be $1.6 billion, $1.2 billion, and $2.4 billion respectively. So we can estimate the total market opportunity as $5.2 billion with the top-down approach,” Önal pointed out.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates SOCRadar from the competition?
“The cybersecurity sector has tough competition while generating new startups and unicorns at the same time. To survive in this competitive race, SOCRadar distinguishes itself from our competitors in many ways: through our product, services, pricing, and our subscription models,” Önal acknowledged. “The most differentiated part is our novel business model which aims to share our insights and analysis with customers for free at the beginning and then turn it into an asset-based business model. With this mechanism, hundreds of thousands of firms used SOCRadar Labs’ online tools for free and used Freemium advantages. As product differentiation points, SOCRadar XTI provides EASM, CTI, and DRPS under one platform with an easily accessible online control hub. Thus, we provide a freemium usage period before activating pricing so our potential customers can be sure before purchasing.”
Future Company Goals
What are SOCRadar’s future company goals?
“SOCRadar always aims to provide a safer digital world and democratize threat intelligence. Our mission is to sustain a better security surface for all of our customers and users that we reach,” Önal reflected. “In the future, we aim to reach more users and expand to more countries and industries, particularly in the US. While working towards this, we will continue releasing new solutions with improved XTI by generating and integrating new technologies within it.”
