Nagomi launches with $30M to optimize enterprises’ cybersecurity toolkits – Business
Nagomi Security Ltd., a startup that helps enterprises make their cybersecurity software more effective against cyberattacks, launched today with $30 million in funding.
TCV led the investment with participation from the venture capital arms of CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. and Okta Inc. Returning backer Team8 chipped in as well.
Cybersecurity products don’t always succeed at mitigating the hacking tactics they were built to fend off. Many firewalls, for example, determine what malicious websites to block based on a list of domains provided by administrators. If the list misses a domain used by hackers to launch cyberattacks, traffic from that domain might be allowed to enter the corporate network.
“We’ve seen that over 80% of breaches occur at organizations that already had a tool in place to prevent it, and security teams are increasingly frustrated that they can’t be sure that the solutions they have deployed are protecting them against real threats,” said Nagomi co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Emanuel Salmona.
New York and Tel Aviv-based Nagomi offers a software platform designed to fix such cybersecurity gaps. The Proactive Defense Platform, as it’s called, can map out the online threats facing an organization. It then determines whether the organization’s cybersecurity systems can effectively block those threats.
Nagomi identifies risks using MITRE ATT&CK, a widely-used breach tactic database. It’s a kind of reference book that contains information on the methods hackers use to find network vulnerabilities, evade detection by antivirus tools and perform related tasks. Enterprises use the database to identify ways of improving their cybersecurity posture.
According to Nagomi, its platform can scan a company’s breach prevention systems and determine how effective they are against the threats cataloged in MITRE ATT&CK. It does so by evaluating the configuration settings of each cybersecurity tool. The platform can, for example, determine if a company’s ransomware mitigation system may struggle to block certain types of file encryption attacks.
After it identifies configuration-related cybersecurity gaps, Nagomi’s platform generates suggestions on how to fix them. The software also prioritizes the issues it finds by severity to help administrators fix the most urgent problems first. Nagomi does so without requiring customers to install agents, or data collection programs, in their networks, which reduces manual work for administrators.
The company says its platform can double as a cost-saving tool. In addition to identifying cybersecurity gaps, Nagomi spots cases where an enterprise has deployed breach prevention tools with overlapping features. Removing unnecessary software reduces licensing costs and reduces the number of cybersecurity products that administrators must maintain.
Nagomi was founded last January under the name Vena Security. The company launched its platform six months later and has since built up a customer base that generates more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue. To maintain its growth, Nagomi will invest the proceeds from its new $30 million round in go-to-market initiatives and feature development.