A vulnerability intelligence startup with a team pulled from companies like Boston-based Rapid7 and Burlington-based Veracode has raised a seed round.
Today, VulnCheck announced a $3.2 million seed funding round led by Sorenson Ventures with participation from In-Q-Tel. The company said it also received angel funding from Dave Cole, co-founder and CEO of Open Raven and former CPO at CrowdStrike and Tenable, and Oliver Friedrichs, founder and CEO at Pangea and former CEO at Phantom and Immunet.
The Lexington-based startup offers cyber threat intelligence services. VulnCheck says it can provide companies, government agencies or other cybersecurity providers with real-time vulnerability intelligence so they can close any gaps before others take advantage of them. Importantly, VulnCheck says, vulnerabilities are prioritized based on the company’s threat and exploit data.
“VulnCheck’s superpower is its ability to discover vulnerability intelligence that other solutions are unable to access, acquire, and have no ability to find — which is the key to security since you can’t secure what you don’t know about,” Tony Spinelli, venture partner at Sorenson Ventures, said in a statement.
Katie Gray, senior partner at In-Q-Tel, said that existing solutions that provide “vulnerability data alone does not give security teams enough context to help them prioritize remediation efforts.”
"By enriching vulnerability data with information about exploit activity, VulnCheck is giving security teams the coveted ability to prioritize remediation of vulnerabilities based on a real-time assessment of exploit weaponization,” Gray said in a statement.
VulnCheck is led by Anthony Bettini, the former head of research at Tenable, a Maryland company that helps businesses and government agencies understand and reduce cyber risk. Bettini is also the former founder and CEO of FlawCheck and Appthority. FlawCheck was acquired by Tenable and Appthority was bought by Symantec.
VulnCheck said its team also includes former lead researchers at Tenable, Rapid7 (Nasdaq: RPD), Dragos, and Veracode and former lead exploit developers of MetaSploit.
“Our team’s mission is to autonomously gather and leverage exploit and vulnerability intelligence to manage the world’s vulnerabilities at scale,” said Bettini. “The investments we’ve secured show strong confidence in our vision. We are thrilled to be working with these strategic partners to fuel our next stage of growth.”
The company said it plans to use the new seed funding to grow its team and boost product development.
