Hunters Raises $15 Million in Series A Funding to Speed Enterprise Breach Detection & Response with Autonomous Threat Hunting

Hunters today announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding to scale its autonomous threat hunting solution to defend enterprises from intruders and missed attacks across cloud, network, endpoint and more. Investors include Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Silicon Valley high-tech venture investor U.S. Venture Partners, with participation by seed investors YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital, and Okta Ventures, the venture arm of publicly traded enterprise identity leader, Okta. This new investment brings the total funding to date to $20.4 million.

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Hunters team. Co-founders Uri May, CEO (l.) and Tomer Kazaz, CTO (r.) seated in the front row center (Photo: Business Wire)

Just 18 months after its inception, Hunters is shipping its SaaS-based autonomous threat hunting product to customers that include Snowflake and TripActions, via direct sales and through partner channels like the CrowdStrike Store, and Snowflake Partner Connect. Hunters.AI, the company’s platform, addresses the problem of missed attacks by autonomously detecting attack techniques and correlating them across a multitude of surfaces. Hunters will use the funds to deepen its ongoing ML R&D and further enable customers to extend threat detection with best-of-breed security components.

Industry analysts acknowledge that single-point solutions cannot effectively defend against multi-pronged attacks. Furthermore, the pace and scale of threats outstrip human-led detection and response, and overwhelm SOC team triage with a deluge of alerts and false-positives. This is why the industry is turning toward Extended Detection & Response (XDR) that cuts across all attack surfaces and reduces alert noise.

Hunters’ unique XDR capability picks up weak threat signals hiding in the noise and connects them across sparse and siloed data sources. Its broad, independent ecosystem allows customers to utilize existing security solutions and organizational data sources to detect more threats, faster. By connecting to a wide array of raw data and integrating telemetry across the IT stack, Hunters.AI applies its TTP-based intelligence (tactics, techniques and procedures) to surface potential attack signals, maps them to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and automatically analyzes, enriches and correlates massive volumes of data. It then delivers high confidence attack findings to expedite response by SOC teams, while significantly reducing alert fatigue and false warnings.

Hunters was recently recognized in Gartner’s March 2020 “Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response” report (Gartner subscription required). The report notes, “Extended detection and response describes a unified security incident detection and response platform that automatically collects and correlates data from multiple proprietary security components.”

“To overcome today’s cyber threat landscape, enterprise CISOs need to think like attackers in order to anticipate their moves, and they need to do it at scale. By automating the threat hunting process, Hunters addresses both needs,” said Mony Hassid, General Manager and Managing Director of EMEA, M12. “Hunters has an exceptionally strong team with an intimate understanding of attacker techniques, which is critical in this business.”

“USVP strives to identify market opportunities created by applying novel technology approaches to well understood customer pain points and Hunters XDR is a perfect example,” noted Dr. Jacques Benkoski, Partner at U.S. Venture Partners. “We see an exploding market opportunity in Hunters with its unique ability to derive strong insights from correlation of small signals across diverse telemetry. The company's emphasis on integration with best-of-breed security systems enables easy customer adoption and the autonomous nature of the system dramatically simplifies detection of ongoing attacks while at the same time reducing the load on overburdened security teams.”

“Okta’s mission is to enable any organization to securely use any technology. Today’s distributed organizations are faced with more security threats than ever before,” said Monty Gray, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at Okta. “Hunters’ diverse XDR ecosystem and unique detection technology offer our joint customers an integrated value, and a resilient security solution to help them overcome these challenges and increase their overall security posture.”

“The Series A investment validates the tremendous progress we’ve made on the technical front with ML and threat research, and commercially with cybersecurity ecosystem partners,” said Uri May, Hunters co-founder and CEO. “We are excited to join the impressive portfolios of M12 and USVP and to be able to leverage the support, experience and networks of these top U.S. venture firms. The participation of cloud-native, enterprise identity leader Okta, via Okta Ventures, is an additional significant vote of confidence in the value Hunters brings to the cybersecurity ecosystem.”

Request a demo to learn more about Hunters and the advanced Hunters.AI autonomous threat hunting solution.

About the Investors

M12, Microsoft's venture fund, invests in enterprise software companies in the Series A through C funding stages with a focus on applied AI, business applications, infrastructure, security, and vanguard technologies. As part of its value-add to portfolio companies, M12 offers unique access to strategic go-to-market resources and relationships globally. M12 has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru.

U.S Venture Partners brings over 30 years’ experience in early-stage high-technology venture funding, With US$3.9 billion invested to date in nearly 500 companies, USVP helps entrepreneurs build market leaders including cybersecurity lighthouses Check Point, Imperva, Luminate, Threatmetrix, Trusteer and Vontu.

YL Ventures funds and supports Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs from seed to lead. With $270M under management and headquarters in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, the value-add-focused VC firm leverages its multidisciplinary team and extensive network to support its founders through every step of development of their businesses.

Blumberg Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with passionate entrepreneurs to innovate and build successful technology companies. Blumberg Capital is headquartered in San Francisco with team members in Tel Aviv and New York.

Okta Ventures is a $50 million investment fund fueling the next generation of modern identity solutions. As Okta is the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, Okta Ventures is committed to accelerating innovation throughout the identity ecosystem by investing in cutting edge technologies focusing on identity, security, and privacy.

*Gartner “Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response,” Peter Firstbrook, Craig Lawson, 19 March 2020

Media Resources

• Testimonial: Extending Threat Detection with Hunters.AI - Mario Duarte, VP Security, Snowflake
• Blog post: XDR: The Cybersecurity X Factor
• Webinar On-Demand: ‘Extending Threat Detection with Hunters and CrowdStrike’
• Webinar On-Demand featuring Forrester’s Principal Analyst Josh Zelonis: ‘The X Factor - How to Extend your Security Solutions into an XDR’

About Hunters

Hunters’ autonomous threat hunting solution detects cyberattacks that bypass existing controls in every IT environment. Hunters.AI extends threat detection and response across every attack surface – a capability increasingly known as ‘XDR.’ It ingests rich security telemetry and intelligence from a wide array of data sources and IT environments like cloud and network, and enriches threat signals with unique tactics, techniques and procedure based (TTP) attack intelligence. It then applies ML and cloud-based analytics to correlate threat patterns and provide high fidelity attack stories for cybersecurity team response. Learn more at: Hunters.AI.

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