StrikeReady Emerges out of Stealth With $3.28M in Seed Funding

StrikeReady has raised $3.28 million in seed funding. 11.2 Capital led the round along with Outlier Venture Capital.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--()--StrikeReady, a cloud-native security operations and management company, has raised $3.28M. The seed round was led by 11.2 Capital, with participation from Outlier Venture Capital and multiple Silicon Valley angel investors. The funds will be used to accelerate Go-To-Market, sales and grow the R&D team.

StrikeReady has built a cloud-native security operations and management platform that maximizes return on organizations’ existing security investments – people, process and products. The platform integrates, operationalizes, optimizes and consolidates disparate security products, and assists and empowers cybersecurity teams. The convergence of AI, data and automation helps the defenders to quickly respond to incidents, proactively defend against emerging threats, and operate at lightning speed.

After decades of experience in cybersecurity and talking to hundreds of cybersecurity analysts and CISOs, the StrikeReady team identified three key problems to current security operations.

  1. Cybersecurity Skill Gap: Majority of the security teams struggle with the deep understanding of every cybersecurity vendor's product’s granular capabilities, its strengths and its weaknesses. The excessive tools and massively overlapping features further compound the problem. In addition, the adversary always finds a new way to attack and only post-attack the new technique, tactic or methodology is discovered.
  2. Cyber Fatigue: Security practitioners continue to experience burnout as they are bombarded with alerts. They get fatigued over time and occasionally run the risk of missing out on the most critical alerts. The majority of the security leaders struggle to fill open cybersecurity positions, and even if they do, they tend to experience a massive churn due to analyst burnout.
  3. Collaboration and Remote Work: Organizations tend to have various teams within the cybersecurity department such as SOC team, DFIR team, and others. These are often siloed and there is a lack of free flow of information among themselves.

StrikeReady reimagined a solution and built it from the ground up to address the pressing needs of the defenders – be it a SOC Analyst, an Incident Responder, a Threat Intel analyst, a Threat Hunter, a Red Teamer, a Security Engineer, and more.

“Assume you’re going to get breached – is the new normal for the cybersecurity industry since bad actors are scaling their attacks through automation, and organizations need to adopt a similar approach. Convergence of AI, knowledge, and automation is a must to improve security analysts’ productivity and abridge their skill gap. StrikeReady’s founders, Yasir and Anurag, have deep domain expertise in security operations and AI-powered automation. They have built a unique product that accelerates incident investigation, automates response, imparts knowledge and proactively secures the organization. 11.2 Capital is excited to support the team's mission in bringing Security Operations into the future,” said Pramod Gosavi, 11.2 Capital.

The StrikeReady team is led by Yasir Khalid, the former engineering lead and architect at FireEye, and joined by Anurag Gurtu, the former head of security product marketing (UEBA) at Splunk and the head of technical marketing at FireEye. StrikeReady has a stellar team of Engineers, who were early hires at FireEye and have had extensive experience working on various security stacks – network security, endpoint security, email security, cloud security and automation.

In less than two years, StrikeReady deployed its product at numerous large and mid-sized enterprises and government agencies in the United States and internationally.

“Thrilled to back Yasir and his team at StrikeReady as they build the future platform of cybersecurity operations. We firmly believe that human augmentation is best approach of addressing the talent crunch in cybersecurity. It is impressive to see what the StrikeReady team has accomplished in such short period of time. We are thrilled to see their product deployed within organizations in the United States and internationally,” said Mohammed Almeshekah, Managing Partner of Outlier Venture Capital.

"If we look at the state of cybersecurity today, we never had so many security tools at our disposal. These tools range from next-generation detection or prevention technologies, security awareness frameworks to threat intelligence products and more. All these technologies provide unprecedented insights into the attackers and their workings. Yet, organizations have only been able to improve their security posture marginally. And this validates our thesis – the problem is cybersecurity skill-gap, talent shortage and lack of collaboration,” said Yasir Khalid, Founder and CEO of StrikeReady. “Our vision is to take a human-centered approach to make the security team effective and exceptionally efficient while transforming cybersecurity analysts to become experts, and that too without off-the-job training.”

About StrikeReady

StrikeReady is committed to squarely focus on the most foundational element in cybersecurity – The People – with a simple goal – Empower Defenders. The product brings together contextual awareness, automation, knowledge and collaboration to modernize security operations. The product integrates with all the leading endpoint, network and cloud and intelligence products.

For more information, visit StrikeReady.co.

Contacts

Media contact:
Brenda Christensen
Stellar PR
818/307-9942
brenda.christensen@stellar-pr.com

Contacts

Media contact:
Brenda Christensen
Stellar PR
818/307-9942
brenda.christensen@stellar-pr.com