CyberX raises $18 million to protect industrial control systems from cyberattack
CyberX, the IIoT and industrial control system (ICS) security company, announced that it has raised $18 million in a strategic funding round led by Qualcomm Ventures and Inven Capital. Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Glilot Capital Partners, Flint Capital, and OurCrowd also participated in the round, bringing total funding to date to $48 million.
The new funding will enable CyberX to further capitalize on its market leadership position by expanding its global go-to-market footprint, innovative product development, and IIoT threat intelligence capabilities.
Qualcomm Ventures has a demonstrated track record of investing in some of the top global AI and IoT startups and has experienced nine $1-billion-plus portfolio exits to date, including Fitbit and Waze. Inven Capital is the CEZ Group’s venture capital fund supported by the European Investment Bank (EIB).
“We believe CyberX has the right management team, deep domain expertise, and scalable technology to address the needs of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises,” said Boaz Peer, director, Qualcomm Israel Ltd. and investment director, Qualcomm Ventures.
“We’re delighted to join as an investor given Qualcomm’s strong interest in Industrial IoT and our ability to provide connectivity, compute and security solutions for this market.”
The latest round of funding comes at a time when CyberX has experienced significant customer growth across all industrial and critical infrastructure sectors including energy, oil and gas, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, mining, water utilities, building management, and other sectors.
Growth is being driven by heightened board-level awareness of the significant business risks posed by digital transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). On one hand, these key initiatives are unlocking new levels of global productivity and efficiency.
At the same time, they’re driving deployment of billions of new IIoT devices and pervasive connectivity between IT and Operational Technology (OT) networks — increasing the attack surface and risk of costly downtime and dangerous cyber-physical safety incidents.
Founded in 2013 by military cyber experts with a proven track record of defending critical infrastructure from nation-state attacks, CyberX is the only industrial cybersecurity company to have been awarded a patent for its innovative, ICS-aware threat detection analytics and machine learning technology.
Purpose-built for the specialized protocols and devices of OT environments, CyberX’s agentless platform enables organizations to continuously auto-discover unmanaged IIoT devices and monitor their OT networks for destructive cyberattacks such as WannaCry, NotPetya, and TRITON.
Additionally, by integrating with customers’ existing IT security stacks (Splunk, IBM Security, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, RSA NetWitness, ServiceNow, etc.), CyberX enables organizations to more effectively manage IT/OT risk and leverage scarce security personnel across both IT and OT.
“The backing we’ve received from new and existing investors is clear validation of both the massive market opportunity and CyberX’s proven ability to execute,” said Omer Schneider, CyberX co-founder and CEO. “We’re thrilled to have seasoned investors like Qualcomm Ventures and Inven Capital join our team as we continue growing the company at triple-digit rates.”
“Our societies and global economy rely on a dependable supply of energy, water, food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, metals, and transportation,” said Nir Giller, CyberX co-founder, CTO, and EMEA GM. “We have a unique opportunity to leverage our differentiated technology and world-class expertise to secure the critical infrastructure supply chain upon which our modern world depends.”
“We live in an era where everything is becoming digital and connected and even critical infrastructure is being managed digitally,” said Viktor Miskovsky, investment director and member of the board at Inven Capital.
“This brings a need for an industrial cybersecurity solution that is sophisticated yet simple to deploy and use. We believe that CyberX has the right mix of talent, superior technology, and experienced investors to be the leader in this field.”