When Ted Ross and Dave Endler founded SpyCloud in 2016, it had all the makings of a powerful cybersecurity startup.
Its founders had NSA experience, as well as high-level private sector backgrounds with companies including TippingPoint and HP. Their new startup set out to prevent account takeovers, crawl the dark web to find compromised accounts, identify evolving network security threats and help clean up the messiest space in security -- passwords.
Three years later, SpyCloud is hitting full stride.
On Wednesday, the company announced it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by M12, a venture fund created by Microsoft. Altos Ventures also hopped on the SpyCloud bandwagon, along with prior investors Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners.
The new money will help SpyCloud expand its research team, develop new products, expand sales and marketing, and branch out internationally.
Prior to this, SpyCloud raised a $2.5 million seed round, which was followed last year by a $5 million Series A.
SpyCloud seems to have hit the market at the right time, as a variety of security breaches has impacted almost every American business and consumer in some way in the past two years.
Thwarting those attacks requires a multi-prong approach. And much of that is based on developing rock solid data that helps show which passwords, usernames and other credentials are already on the black market. Last year, SpyCloud says it recovered and analyzed roughly 3.5 billion sets of credentials that stemmed from 3,000 data breaches.
"Passwords and their reuse across personal and work accounts are the leading cause of ATO, one of the most imminent threats to businesses of all sizes," said Ross, who is SpyCloud's CEO. "As criminals use more complex, scalable methods to collect and weaponize compromised passwords, organizations need to take proactive measures to prevent, detect and remediate exposures. SpyCloud meets that immediate need."
