A young cybersecurity firm that works to identify and inform companies of vulnerabilities across their managed software infrastructure has raised $4.85 million in funding.
Vigilant Ops Inc., based in Plum, will use the new capital to help scale out its workforce, which currently consists of two executives in Pittsburgh and one in Philadelphia.
DataTribe, a Fulton, Maryland-based cybersecurity-focused startup investor and incubator, led the round with $2 million in seed funding.
According to Ken Zalevsky, Vigilant co-founder, CEO and a 20-year cybersecurity veteran, the startup plans to double its workforce this year seeing as development is mostly complete for its Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) product, which serves as a detailed guide of all the software an enterprise is using and the various components, dependencies and other data points tied to these digital tools.
With its InSight platform, Zalevsky said companies can better adapt to ever-evolving cybersecurity threats that, for many firms, are too frequent and complex for individual companies to manage on their own, which has lent itself to a business of its own that Vigilant is aiming to capture.
Vigilant is primarily focused on serving the health care sector for now, but Zalevsky said companies across industries can benefit from its product offering.
"Today, without the software bill of materials, [companies] have to call the vendor and say, 'hey, a vulnerability is hidden in this software, is that going to impact me,' and so the idea is to provide that information," Zalevsky, a Pittsburgh native who offered cybersecurity management at Bayer for decades before launching this startup, said. "We pull that all together and I say we take the SBOM problem off your hands whether you produce technology or consume technology, our solution fits for you."
Zalevsky said Vigilant has customers in the health care space but declined to share specific revenue figures at this time. He's bullish on the company's future growth potential given recent federal regulations requiring many firms that work with the Federal Drug Administration to have an SBOM.
