A McLean cybersecurity startup, whose pedigree includes research from Carnegie Mellon University and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has secured a $25 million equity financing round.
Executives from Affirm Logic Corp. — formerly known as Lenvio Inc. — said the funding, which came from a private equity investor they declined to name, would go toward bringing on more engineering, sales and marketing staff as it continues to garner interest for its algorithm-based malware detection software. In all, it will help elevate a 19-person staff to what is expected to be a 25-employee workforce by the end of the quarter.
“We’ve been able to staff up mostly engineering,” CEO Larry Roshfeld said in an interview. “I’d say two-thirds of our investment in growth is mostly going to engineering folks and about a third is going into sales and marketing. On both sides, we were able to get very talented people much faster than I would have expected.”
The company, which started in 2016 as a spinoff of Manassas-based R&K Cyber Solutions LLC, has its roots in cybersecurity research conducted by Carnegie Mellon called Mathematical Behavioral Computation, essentially using algorithms and mathematics to track software behavior as a way to guard against malware and computer viruses.
The method was developed into a cybersecurity platform called Hyperion by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate licensed Hyperion to Affirm Logic in 2017 through its Transition to Practice (TTP) program, which helps commercialize federally funded cybersecurity technologies. A creator of Hyperion, Richard Linger, now serves as Affirm Logic's chief technology officer.
Hyperion analyzes the possible behaviors of software on a network, rather than tracking traditional indicators like software signatures, to help identify potentially dormant malware.
“If you don’t know what your software is doing, you have no idea whether it’s safe or not,” Roshfeld said. “So by mathematically calculating all of the behavior paths through a piece of software, we can identify things that we know are malicious or that we expect to be malicious.”
That could help safeguard organizations from the threat of ransomware, Zero-Day attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), especially for those who have had to unexpectedly shift their employees to remote work — as has been the case throughout this coronavirus pandemic.
Roshfeld said that as an early-stage company, Affirm Logic has been focusing on direct sales to both federal and commercial markets, as well as partnering with system integrators and other businesses for contract work across the defense, civilian and intelligence sectors.
"We were awarded a contract for Hyperion with one of the unified combatant commands of the U.S. Department of Defense, and have teamed with a number of partners on upcoming federal contracts," he said in an email. "We are also pursuing opportunities directly in a variety of market verticals, including the financial and health care markets."
Roshfeld, who has led AffirmLogic since 2018, has a deep background in the tech space. According to his LinkedIn profile, in addition to stints at Lotus Development Corp. and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Roshfeld has served as founder and CEO of startups CivicsUSResearch and Trigon Health, while also holding executive roles at other startups like Riverbed Technologies, Approva, CorasWorks, Sonatype and Lumeon.
The $25 million equity funding comes on the heels of a $5.2 million round for Affirm Logic in May with six investors, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in June.
