Seattle-based cybersecurity startup Dropzone AI is looking to grow its presence after raising a $16.9 million Series A round Thursday.
Dropzone founder and CEO Edward Wu said the startup has eight employees now but will look to have around 20 in a year. Five of Dropzone's employees are based in Seattle, he added, and the company wants to accelerate its product development with the funding.
"Another component is to get the technology into the hands of more early adopters and customers," Wu said. "We are at this moment hiring a couple of additional engineers, but we are also looking to our network and hiring a couple of other roles in the go-to-market function."
Dropzone, founded in 2023, makes a cybersecurity analyst bot that investigates threats and automates lower-level tasks, freeing up human analysts to tackle more technical work. Dropzone also generates full reports with summaries and insights into how serious is the threat.
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Wu said organizations can have thousands of alerts to triage and investigate, which takes a huge amount of time away from human agents. Dropzone's clients include the insurance tech company Lemonade and the cybersecurity firm Critical Insight.
Dropzone doesn't have office space for now. Wu said the team in Seattle will occasionally work together at employees' homes, but given this is a hard model to scale, he said the company will likely look for coworking space down the road.
Dropzone's investors include Theory Ventures, Decibel Partners, PSL Ventures and In-Q-Tel. Wu founded Dropzone after spending eight years at Seattle-based cybersecurity company ExtraHop. He said much of the team has worked together in the past, which benefits Wu as a founder.
According to a 2023 workforce report from the cybersecurity member association ISC2, the gap between cybersecurity workers needed and cybersecurity workers available grew 12.6% from 2022 to 2023. The report noted this translated to a global shortage of about 4 million cybersecurity professionals in 2023.
"It's clear to anybody watching the news, not even working in cybersecurity, that cyber defenders are losing," Wu said. "Unless somebody invents cloning tomorrow, it's clear that human defenders alone are not sufficient or going to win the war against attackers."
