Over the past 30 years or so, industrial enterprises have replaced equipment that’s manually operated with more modern computer-operated equipment.
This has increased efficiency, but also the risks of cyberattacks.
To add an extra layer of protection against such attacks, Joshua Steinman and his team founded Galvanick in 2021. The company created an extended detection and response platform, which means that it sits on top of — and makes sense of — the alerts that are generated from existing industrial cybersecurity tools, traditional networking equipment and applications that control industrial environments.
With $10 million in fresh seed funding announced Thursday, the company is poised to release the platform soon.
Investors in the round included MaC Venture Capital, Founders Fund, Village Global, Countdown Capital, Hanover Technology Investment Management, Shrug Capital, 8090 Industries and more than 25 angel investors specializing in cybersecurity, manufacturing, finance and defense. Galvanick plans to use the new capital for hiring and expanding the capabilities of its initial software platform.
Galvanick's platform was designed for manufacturing, infrastructure and logistics companies. Typical customers might be drug manufacturers or oil refineries.
Some similar companies include Presenso, which uses AI-based predictive maintenance in industrial environments, and idBlender, which provides secure network solutions.
Recent incidents at major industrial facilities have cost billions of dollars. So it’s not surprising that the market value of the industrial cybersecurity market was more than $15 billion last year, and growing annually at an estimated rate of 15%.
Spending on industrial cybersecurity resources currently exceeds $15 billion dollars per year, and is growing.
“As machinery gets connected to networks, the potential points of failure drastically increase,” Steinman said.
Foundation
The founding team at Galvanick spent six months interviewing global experts to understand the challenges of securing industrial systems against cyberattacks, Steinman told L.A. Inno.
They ultimately made two discoveries: One, that industrial cybersecurity talent is “extremely rare,” he said. And two, that various industrial data streams can be challenging to analyze in real time with existing software.
So Galvanick is a platform that enables industrial companies to monitor for cyberattacks without the need to hire “expensive security teams,” he added.
Deep expertise
Steinman is a former U.S. Naval Officer and multi-company founder who served as the senior-most cyber policymaker for the U.S. on the National Security Council from 2017–2021.
While there, he led government-wide efforts to improve the cybersecurity of the maritime industry, space industry, defense industry and critical infrastructure.
Co-founder Brandon Park helped support Amazon’s global industrial cybersecurity program. And Feliks Pleszczynski is a former trader, economist and White House staffer.
The engineering team at Galvanick comes from Amazon, Google, Uber and Bechtel, and has “deep experience” securing industrial systems against cyberattacks, Steinman said.
Galavanick plans to release its first product to its initial customers this summer. It’s a platform that aggregates data from industrial equipment and environments and continuously monitors threats. This enables operations and IT/security teams to “quickly” understand the difference between normal and malicious behavior, Steinman said.
The company’s headquarters is in Los Angeles. It also has an office in Seattle.
