Automox raises $30 million to automate endpoint hardening
Automox has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with participation from CRV and CrowdStrike, which is investing through the Falcon Fund in partnership with Accel.
Automox will use the capital to accelerate key feature development for its platform and expand its sales and marketing teams to support its rapidly growing enterprise customer base. The round brings Automox’s total funding to $42 million.
“The security industry has done a great job of providing tools that are effective at identifying adversaries once they are inside your infrastructure,” said Jay Prassl, Founder and CEO, Automox. “Unfortunately, little innovation has been applied to proactively reduce the corporate attack surface by making sure the “windows and doors” that attackers commonly exploit are locked to begin with. This is where Automox is focused.”
Nearly two out of three data breaches are attributed to vulnerabilities that security and IT teams know about, and studies show that adversaries weaponize new vulnerabilities within seven days of being disclosed.
Automox’s modern cloud-native platform enables security and IT teams to automate the fundamentals of endpoint hardening, resulting in a reduction of their corporate attack surface by up to 80%. This approach not only makes corporate infrastructure more resilient to attack, but it also dramatically reduces alert fatigue common in downstream endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.
“Out of date, unpatched and misconfigured infrastructure is a pervasive security gap that has plagued corporations of every size for far too long,” said Byron Knight, Managing Director at Koch Disruptive Technologies. “Automox, which has proven itself as a disruptive leader in the cybersecurity industry, is addressing this issue. KDT wants to partner with companies solving the world’s most complex challenges with innovative solutions, and Automox fits this criterion.”
The latest funding comes at a time when adversaries are increasingly targeting vulnerable infrastructure that has been left unpatched and misconfigured. Launched in 2016, just before the NSA-derived ransomware worm WannaCry shut down computers worldwide, Automox has kept customers ahead of adversaries by hardening enterprise infrastructure 15x faster than the traditional tools deployed by most corporations.
“Automox is innovating within a critical and underserved portion of the security stack, and we are excited to have its technology be offered through the CrowdStrike Store and to support them through the Falcon Fund,” said Amol Kulkarni, chief product officer, CrowdStrike. “Automox and CrowdStrike are making it easier than ever to stop breaches with unmatched speed and velocity. Our customers will benefit greatly from this integration through the automation and hardening of their endpoint infrastructures.”
“The only true competitive advantage in security today is speed,” added Prassl. “Hardening infrastructure quickly and confidently is the most impactful step an organization can take to reduce its overall cybersecurity risk.”