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Cybersecurity company Virsec today announced it raised $100 million in a series C round from more than 70 investors. CEO Dave Furneaux tells VentureBeat this is “a major milestone” and the company will use the funds to hire, meet product demand, and build out a robust customer support model.
Aside from venture firms, the expansive roster of investors spans the public and private sectors and includes experts such as former Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers, former EMC chairman and CEO Mike Ruettgers, and several former high-ranking government and intelligence officials.
“Recent events have shown us how an attack on one business or sector has a ripple effect across our entire economy. This impacts our security as a nation as well as the security of every other nation. The line between private and public interests not only blur but intersect,” Furneaux said. “With this group of advisors, we gain invaluable expertise, resources, and insight that spans from enterprise to technology to public policy, which helps inform our direction and our development.”
About Virsec
Virsec launched in 2015 and provides software security solutions. The company claims its Virsec Security Platform (VSP) stops attacks at the first point of entry, but overall believes “detection is a lost cause,” according to Furneaux. Like other companies including Uptycs and Opswat, Virsec is focused on prevention.
“We realized that threat chasing and detection and response is a game we cannot win. We had to find another way to protect software. Our technology is engineered to protect the integrity of the application workload code itself as it executes in runtime,” Furneaux said. He isn’t shy with his claims either, adding that the “technology can protect software against any cyberattack — no matter how advanced.”
The company currently holds more than 50 patents and has customers in the health care, technology, and financial sectors, as well as in government and defense.
A new era for security
Cyberattacks are not only on the rise, but also increasing in sophistication as bad actors form alliances and adopt new tools and techniques. The attack surface has also changed and is growing, according to security analytics industry veteran Gunter Ollmann, who recently told VentureBeat that “there isn’t today the breadth of security tooling and security visibility needed to really counter these threats.”
Research from IBM published last year additionally found that while organizations have been slowly getting better at planning, detecting, and responding to cyberattacks, their ability to contain active threats has actually declined by 13%.
Furneaux said Virsec will continue R&D to meet the changing landscape, including new applications, environments, and architectures enterprises will define and deploy. He believes in “betting big,” both in terms of Virsec and the industry at large.
“We believe that the entire industry needs to change,” Furneaux said. “Better security will not be defined product-by-product, company-by-company, or sector-by-sector; it has to be a holistic change in what we think is possible.”
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