SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SpecterOps, a provider of adversary-focused cybersecurity solutions born out of unique insights of advanced threat actor tradecraft, today announced it has raised a $25M Series A venture funding round led by Decibel. This funding will accelerate the already significant adoption of BloodHound Enterprise (BHE), the industry’s first platform for comprehensively removing identity attack paths in Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD. It will also expand company research and development initiatives. Other investors in this round include Kevin Mandia, the CEO and founder of Mandiant, as well as Jon Oberheide and Dug Song, the co-founders of Duo Security.
BloodHound Enterprise was launched in 2021 and was inspired by the success of SpecterOps’s BloodHound free and open source software (FOSS), which has become a wildly popular tool for penetration testers and red teamers to identify Attack Paths within on-premises Active Directory and Azure AD cloud environments. The platform experienced rapid customer adoption in 2022 with significant product revenue growth and new customer acquisition growing by more than 600%. Today, BloodHound Enterprise is used worldwide by companies like Capital Group, the University of Texas at Austin and Woodside Energy.
"We've seen incredible growth in the past year as enterprises recognize the need for practical solutions to identity-based threats. Our approach with BloodHound Enterprise is unique because rather than focusing on controlling access, we treat the identity ecosystem as a networked graph, mapping attack paths continuously in the same manner that bad actors test the soft spots of a corporate ecosystem,” says David McGuire, CEO at SpecterOps. "This new funding will enable us to further invest in R&D, grow our team, deliver powerful new features to customers, expand our consulting and training teams, and take our research and open-source projects to the next level.”
Funding will also be used to expand SpecterOps’ services and training solutions, which have been equally successful. SpecterOps employees have made more than 400 security community contributions, created 93 open-source security tools, trained more than 6,900 students in their adversary-focused training courses, and helped over 185 customers with adversary simulation and detection assessments.
The funding news comes on the heels of the latest version of BloodHound FOSS (v4.3), which is available now and includes new Azure Attack Paths covering MS Graph app role assignments, Function Apps, Logic Apps, automation accounts, Azure Kubernetes clusters, and virtual machine scale sets. Funding will be used to expand BloodHound FOSS development and grow the BloodHound community, as well as support new open-source projects and give back to the security community at large.
Decibel Founder and Partner Jon Sakoda views BloodHound Enterprise and its focus on identity attack paths as a timely progression in the industry-wide move to Zero Trust. "Identities are now the connective tissue to corporate systems and data, and attackers are well aware of the power of these pathways. We need to think like attackers do, in complex graphs instead of lists. Identity Access Management is great for managing access, but preventing abuse is just as critical," explains Sakoda. “The SpecterOps team deeply understands the security risks of access, not only because of their experience inside the minds of hackers, but from their years of research from the widely used BloodHound open-source project. We are proud to invest in this incredible team as they pioneer this identity-focused security solution."
"SpecterOps fully understands the complexity of the modern threat landscape,” said Kevin Mandia, SpecterOps investor and Mandiant CEO and founder. “The tools they have built and their approach to Attack Path Management can make dramatic improvements to Active Directory security.”
About SpecterOps
SpecterOps is a cybersecurity solutions and services provider specializing in deep knowledge of adversary tradecraft to help clients detect and defend against sophisticated attackers. The company releases numerous widely used free and open-source security toolsets, including BloodHound, a penetration testing solution which maps attack paths in Active Directory and Azure environments. BloodHound has been recommended by the Department of Homeland Security, PricewaterhouseCoopers and many more. BloodHound Enterprise is the company’s first defense solution for enterprise security and identity teams. For more information on the company and its solutions, visit https://specterops.io/.
About Decibel
Decibel is an independent venture firm based in Silicon Valley that backs technical founders and helps them find product-market fit and accelerate their business. Decibel invests in early-stage enterprise software companies, with a special focus on Developer Platforms, Open Source, Cybersecurity, and ML and AI Infrastructure and Applications. Decibel.vc
