LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SenseOn, the fast-growing UK headquartered cyber security company, today announced its $20m Series A funding round to scale its cloud native AI cybersecurity platform. The fundraise follows a year in which the company grew by more than 350%. The round was led by Eight Roads Ventures and was supported by existing investors MMC Ventures, Crane Venture Partners and Winton Ventures Limited.
This fundraise comes at a time when hacks and breaches are proliferating - with the total number of records compromised in 2020 exceeding 37 billion, a 141% increase compared to 2019 - and the rise in ransomware means attacks on even the smallest companies can be readily monetised. Despite many new cybersecurity tools coming to market, malicious actors still remain undetected because these disparate tools individually protect only specific parts of an organisation’s digital estate and are unable to connect the dots.
Founded in 2017 by David Atkinson, the first cyber specialist in the United Kingdom’s specialist military units, SenseOn brings together cyber security experts, former government cyber operatives and applied machine learning specialists. SenseOn is on a mission to deliver the security architecture for the future, making the digital world safer without fear of ransomware, extortion, data theft and advanced threats.
SenseOn improves cyber team productivity with more effective and faster investigations, and it also reduces costs for its clients by consolidating point solutions and deploying 15x faster. SenseOn combines broad detection and response capabilities across traditionally siloed security domains with AI-based automation and an open security data cloud. Its unified platform proactively detects and shuts down threats including ransomware, hacking / data theft and malicious insiders, solving critical security challenges in a rapidly evolving IT landscape. It’s also uniquely suited to hybrid and remote work settings as it can be rapidly deployed across any endpoint or network inside and outside the traditional perimeter.
The fresh capital will accelerate SenseOn’s ambitious mission through further R&D, as well as scaling its go-to-market team. To support this next phase of growth SenseOn welcomes veteran software go-to-market leader Jeremy Duggan to its board. Jeremy has previously taken three SaaS companies - AppDynamics, Bladelogic and Ascential - to unicorn status.
CEO of SenseOn, David Atkinson commented: “We are facing a new reality whereby attackers are advancing more quickly than legacy approaches can keep up with, but hybrid and multi-cloud environments are far more complex than we yet know how to defend. Added to this, the volume and speed of data is beyond what legacy architecture was ever designed to handle. The daily headlines show legacy approaches don’t work and if we don’t do something courageous now as a security community or we aren’t going to stand a chance in the future. We chose to partner with Eight Roads Ventures because of their ability to support SenseOn’s vision, thanks to their collaborative partnership style, their strong knowledge of the cyber industry and their global footprint.”
Jeremy Duggan added: “After meeting Dave and learning about his personal story and the incredible business he is building I was thrilled to become a board member and play a part in this special company. The product is genuinely market leading, the market is huge, and the people in the team are hugely passionate and intelligent. SenseOn has the potential to become another outstanding UK tech unicorn and it's incredibly exciting to be a part of that.”
This investment round was led by Alston Zecha from Eight Roads Ventures who have a growing portfolio of cybersecurity companies globally. “SenseOn is poised to become a global cybersecurity leader. We have long looked for a company which coordinates detection intelligently across domains and can consolidate multiple tools into one solution. SenseOn does this and more. We are privileged to partner with such a thoughtful and high-integrity group as Dave and team.”
