ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Censys, Inc., the trusted provider of Internet security data, announced its $2.6M Series Seed round to help companies find where their data may be exposed. Led by GV and Greylock Partners, the round also included a number of angel investors passionate about empowering organizations to secure themselves through better visibility. The funding will help Censys collect more data and provide more actionable insights for customers, with key hires planned for engineering and product teams.
Founded by the security researchers and creators of ZMap, which helped popularize Internet-wide scanning in 2013, Censys provides businesses with a global perspective of their servers so that they can understand their exposure and assess security risk. The company’s unique approach to gathering and enriching Internet data and making it available through a custom search engine provides customers with the actionable visibility data they need, without all the noise they get from other available Internet scanners.
Lack of visibility has been a problem in cybersecurity for decades. Today, that challenge is compounded as business data often lives in the cloud and outside traditional corporate networks, which increases the risk of unintentionally exposing business data, customer information, and financial assets.
“Censys provides information security practitioners with critical data-driven insights to prevent cybersecurity threats and better understand network attack surfaces,” said Karim Faris, General Partner at GV. “Driven by a highly technical founding team with a deep security expertise, Censys creates a fuller picture of security risk for researchers, enterprises, and government customers.”
“Prior to moving to the cloud, business data could be tucked safely within a managed, corporate network,” said Asheem Chandna, Partner at Greylock. “The journey to the cloud introduces new security challenges and risk. Censys provides enterprises moving to hybrid IT and cloud with a map of their external attack surface, allowing IT teams to fully comprehend and manage their security risk and exposure.”
As investors, both GV’s Karim Faris and Greylock Partners’ Asheem Chandna bring strong enterprise and security domain knowledge to Censys via their prior experience working with a number of leading companies including Duo Security, Imperva, Sourcefire, Skyhigh Networks, and Palo Alto Networks.
More than 60 customers, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FireEye, Google, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and Swiss Armed Forces have been using Censys data since 2015 to monitor and find corporate infrastructure, and also to track adversaries and prevent phishing attacks and brand impersonation.
About Censys
Censys, Inc.™ is the gold standard in data-driven security used by researchers, corporations, and governments to find and analyze every device connected to the Internet. Founded by the creators of ZMap, Censys gives organizations the visibility they need to fight threats by continuously analyzing real-time Internet data. Investors include GV and Greylock Partners. Companies like FireEye, Google, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Swiss Armed Forces, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security believe that Censys data helps them proactively prevent cybersecurity threats. Follow Censys on Twitter.