From left: SpyCloud Co-Founder David Endler, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and SpyCloud Co-Founder Ted Ross
An Investment into The Future of Account Takeover Prevention
We recently announced that our company, SpyCloud, secured $21 million in new capital led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The series B round also includes Altos Ventures as a new investor, and additional funding from existing partners, Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners. We are excited about the prospects of what we can do with that money and wanted to share our plans on how we will invest those dollars to continue to lead the account takeover prevention market.
Here’s how we will spend the series B funding:
Grow Our Existing Security Research Team
The SpyCloud security research team is second to none. In fact, they are what makes SpyCloud so different from any other account takeover prevention solution on the market. Instead of only relying on automated technologies to gather dark web information once it’s already made public, our team of experts uses multi-tiered, underground intelligence-gathering techniques and tools. This extra step is critical in finding stolen credentials early in the account takeover attempt, before they are sold in underground markets.
A portion of our new capital will be used to add highly-experienced researchers to our team. By doing so, we expect to maintain our edge as the industry’s leading ATO prevention solution by keeping pace with the increasing prevalence of leaked and stolen data across the dark web. This will give our clients the best possible opportunity to discover compromises and take immediate action to safeguard their employees and customers.
Expand Our Development Team
As our team grows, we will continue to add to our database of exposed credentials and personally identifiable information (PII). As of today, our database holds more than 60 billion assets, giving us the largest and highest-quality database in the world. In 2018, we recovered and analyzed 3.5 billion sets of online credentials from nearly 3,000 data breaches, combo lists and other dark web sources.
What differentiates SpyCloud from any other company is that our database contains the most plain text passwords of anyone, thanks to our sophisticated password-cracking technology. Our development team will continue to enhance this capability to give clients the most operationalized data possible. We will also build out our development team to expand our API integrations and Active Directory Guardian capabilities for automated Windows domain protection.
Increase Our Sales and Marketing Teams
SpyCloud was founded to help prevent account takeover. Cybercriminals bank on companies and people being naive, such as believing that reusing passwords across multiple personal and professional accounts is okay. Our goal is to stop criminals in their tracks because their attacks cost our economy billions of dollars every year and wreak havoc on victims. We will continue to help companies identify exposed employee and customer accounts and passwords as early as possible so they can proactively remediate those accounts before criminals can commit fraud or cause harm.
We plan to use some of the funding to increase our sales and marketing efforts to inform more companies and vertical markets of our solution. Many companies are unaware of the risk they face with account takeover. Knowing what we know, we believe it is our responsibility to educate organizations about the threat while empowering them with effective tools that mitigate their risk.
Broaden Our International Footprint
Finally, we want to direct a portion of the funding to expand our international footprint. Account takeover occurs in every country around the globe. We want to help all companies, no matter their geographical location, to protect their interests. Passwords and PII data varies country to country. As we grow our market, we hope to deepen our knowledge and add to our international database of stolen assets.
We’re Hiring
We are excited and optimistic about what this new round of funding will do for SpyCloud and the world at large. With this money, we are more confident than ever that as criminals scale their methods to collect and weaponize compromised passwords, SpyCloud will be able to go toe-to-toe with even the most sophisticated of them. With our investment into these areas, more companies than ever will be able to take proactive measures to prevent, detect and remediate exposures before they cause harm to finances, IP, sensitive data and brand reputation.
If you would like to be part of one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in the country, visit our Careers page to view our current job openings.
