Every company has data. But not so many have data lakes that house unthinkable reams of information.
In the case of SpyCloud Inc., an Austin cybersecurity startup, that means billions of datapoints about compromised accounts, cyber crime tactics and network connections.
"It's kind of mind boggling that we have over 400 billion assets in our database at this point, which means pretty much anyone with a digital identity probably has something in our database," SpyCloud co-founder and CEO Ted Ross said. "And so once we have all this interesting data, we run it through an analytics process and we're able to determine if one of our customers has an employee that is using an infected machine at home to access a work asset, we can actually identify that through the analytics."
Founded in 2016, SpyCloud has evolved from its early days thwarting account takeovers to its growing sophistication that helps some of the world's biggest businesses manage continually evolving cyber crime strategies, especially attacks that target specialized personnel, such as CEOs, chief financial officers and engineers.
Now the company is planning on hiring new tech talent and expanding its detection capabilities following a big injection of fresh funding. SpyCloud said Aug. 23 that is has raised a $110 million round led by California-based Riverwood Capital. The round also included additional investment from Austin-based Silverton Partners, which was among the company's earliest backers.
Ross said the new round of investment is a testament to the company's history of staying on top of evolving threats for large enterprises. The funding also follows SpyCloud's launch of Compass, a system launched earlier this year that can help detect intrusions that traditional security software typically misses. That includes things like cyber criminals swiping application credentials and session cookies from a device and then identifying ways to get inside a corporate network undetected, often in very short periods of time.
"Oftentimes when we're showing people this new product that we have, they're seeing for the first time they had malware, and they didn't know that. And then they go look at the machine and the malware doesn't exist because it literally removed itself from the hard drive," he said. "But, thanks to us, they knew they had an infection, and they have a menu of things they have to go and remediate. ... Because that's what the criminals have in their hands. And those are the things they are going to poke on to do something more nefarious over time."
One of the things that stands out about SpyCloud is that it isn't calling itself an artificial intelligence company or even bragging about how it uses the technology. The company does, in fact, use machine learning but doesn't talk much about it.
"Before SpyCloud, I was a customer and, believe it or not, even eight or nine years ago, I was getting hit over the head with 'AI this, AI that' and every time I heard it my eyes rolled, and I don't want to have the same effect," Ross said. "So we do exact-match technology. We have really interesting analytics behind the scenes, but they don't rely on artificial intelligence."
Ross declined to share the company's valuation. He said the company's revenue has tripled since its last funding round, a $30 million infusion in 2020. SpyCloud has now raised a total of $168.5 million.
The startup currently has 185 employees, about 100 of whom are in Central Texas. The company's office is in a former theater on South Congress Avenue.
Ross said the company plans to hire about 45 more people in the next 12 months.
The CEO isn't thinking much about whether he wants to build the company toward going public or being acquired.
"There's nothing else I'd rather be doing than this," he said. "And I think a lot of people in the company feel the same way. So we're not trying to get to the point where we're doing a quick exit by any means."
Instead, he's focused on how SpyCloud will make the most of all the cyber crime intelligence it has gathered.
"We have this interesting problem," he said. "We have to figure out what we're not going to do."
