A local startup is ending the year with fresh funding to bring cybersecurity protection to small- and mid-sized businesses.
McKinney-based ContraForce, a no-code security automation startup, announced landing a $2 million seed round investment from Maryland cyber foundry and investor DataTribe.
“No longer is it acceptable for smaller organizations to be a step behind in their security and compliance,” the company wrote in a release.
The move comes after ContraForce was named co-winner, alongside Virginia AI dataset training firm QuickCode.ai, of DataTribe’s fourth annual cybersecurity pitch competition – a departure from typically naming only one winner, as judges were “duly impressed” by both companies.
Using artificial intelligence, ContraForce’s platform automates cybersecurity threat detection, providing security data analytics and cyber risk solutions that allow businesses to detect and respond to threats more quickly.
“Just because an organization is small does not mean that it does not possess vital data, IP, or access to strategic networks,” said John Funge, managing director at DataTribe, in a statement. “It is paramount that smaller organizations overcome the resource barriers to robust security. ContraForce’s unique approach dramatically lowers these barriers.”
The company was launched in mid-2020 by Stan Golbuchik and Ricky Melendez, who serves as chief technology officer. Both have spent years at cybersecurity giant McAfee and most recently worked for Armor Cloud Security – Golbuchik as head of global alliances and solutions engineering, Melendez as a security engineer – before launching ContraForce.
ContraForce gained early traction, graduating from the Y Combinator program and landing $125,000 in pre-seed funding from the California-based startup accelerator, according to Crunchbase. In February, the around five-person company was the recipient of grant funding from the McKinney Economic Development Corporation’s Innovation Fund, which it said would help it create 20 new jobs over the next three years.
“Our mission is to empower security and SOC teams and enable them to be more efficient," Golubchik said earlier this year. “With the incredible demand we see within the security industry only continuing to increase, the scalability of our platform allows customers and partners to scale their business outcomes and allows us to help them achieve better security outcomes and risk management.”
