Cybersecurity startup ForAllSecure announced the close of its $21 million Series B fundraising round, which will help propel the Oakland-based company's product line and workforce expansion efforts over the next 18 to 24 months. The funding brings ForAllSecure's total investments to $36 million and the deal is at least the third eight-figure startup fundraising effort announced this month, all of which join the several others that have emerged during the first quarter of 2022.
Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), a subsidiary of Koch Industries, as well as Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, a repeat investor, co-led the Pittsburgh company's most recent round.
According to ForAllSecure's CEO and Co-Founder David Brumley, the company's just-closed funding campaign took about six months to accomplish after it narrowed down its list of potential partners it wanted to work with as the company entered its next scaling stage.
ForAllSecure's signature Mayhem products are capable of autonomously conducting embedded security testing across various applications via its patented algorithms, which were first developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Mayhem finished in first-place at the 2016 DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge and the company has since gone on to secure over 100 customers, including the Department of Defense and Roblox Corp.'s online gaming platform.
"The idea traditionally is; to know what a hacker is going to do, you hire a hacker," Brumley said. "(But) they're really hard to hire and so we built really an AI that does the same thing…it's trying to hack your application, so it's trying new ways to break your application, to try to do all the nasty things that you read about in the news: take your pipeline offline, get access to your energy system; this is what Mayhem is constantly trying to do."
The company has employed about 30 workers over the past year, though Brumley said he anticipates that number climbing to around 50 within the next two years due in part to the new capital, with an emphasis on hiring for marketing and developer relations roles. He declined to disclose the company's revenue figures.
"Our big value proposition is we try to focus people on not just on where a problem is, but how to reproduce it and how to debug it so you can ultimately get it fixed faster," Brumley said. "We built this company around the Cyber Grand Challenge, so we actually picked our tech stack with autonomy in mind as opposed to just saying, 'ok, well, what does the market want out there?' We said we actually need to solve this workforce problem and what is the right tech for that."
KDT Director Navin Maharaj echoed that sentiment as part of KDT's reasoning for investing and co-leading ForAllSecure's Series B.
"The company's cutting-edge autonomous technology is defining the standard in testing and protecting the world's software," Maharaj said in a press release. "Our investment in ForAllSecure underscores our belief that the company is at the forefront of cybersecurity to protect software and software-connected assets from the increasing threats we are seeing today."
ForAllSecure's $21 million Series B follows last week's announcement from Pittsburgh-based Apollo Neuroscience Inc.'s close on its $15 million Series A funding round, which the company plans to use to continue building out its product offering; a patented wearable device that aims to help its users relieve stress and improve sleep through the use of finely-tuned and low-frequency inaudible sound waves.
On March 3, Gecko Robotics, a startup whose robots are capable of climbing critical infrastructure components and capturing data about them with Gecko's proprietary software, announced the close of its $73 million Series C funding round, the region's largest so far this year. That followed the Feb. 1 announcement from Metafy, a Pittsburgh-based video game coaching platform co-founded by CEO Josh Fabian in 2020, which closed on its $25 million Series A capital round. At the start of the year, RoadRunner Recycling disclosed that it reached its $70 million Series D.
