Herndon cybersecurity startup Strivacity Inc. has raised $20 million in new funding to push forward on its research and bolster its sales, marketing and engineering teams, ultimately planning to grow the 42-person company to 70 in the next 12 months.
San Francisco's SignalFire led the Series A2 round, joined by Ten Eleven Ventures, a Boston venture firm that focuses on cybersecurity venture. The round's other investors include Kevin Mandia, CEO of Reston cybersecurity company Mandiant, now an arm of Google, as well as Jack Huffard, co-founder of Columbia-based cybersecurity company Tenable (NASDAQ: TENB), who will join Strivacity as executive chairman.
As part of the investment, Chris Scoggins, a partner at SignalFire, will also join Strivacity’s board.
Strivacity, founded in 2019, helps clients manage and verify customer identity and access, from when a person registers for an online service or enters personal and contact information, be it for a mobile bank account, a retail website or a new mobile app. The company helps maintain and secure the login platform for clients.
“So, it's kind of 'set it and forget it' really,” Strivacity co-founder and CEO Keith Graham. “It's all cloud-hosted and it's delivered almost in real time to the customer at the point that they become a customer. There's nothing to install. They don't need those expensive IT or security skills to maintain the underlying platform. We operate that.”
But as Graham plans for growth, he's also watching the country's economic outlook, knowing that could end up forcing client companies to tighten their purse strings on cybersecurity expenses. He's pitching his company's lower costs as a way to look more attractive alongside companies like Microsoft Corp. or Google.
“Providing those budgets don't go away, we actually represent a more attractive solution,” Graham said. “We require less developers, we require less deployment services, and they don't have to maintain that underlying product anymore.”
The company targets Fortune 1000 companies, or those that make at least $300,000 in annual yearly revenue, given its sales pricing levels. Graham declined to discuss revenue for Strivacity.
To grow the team, it's looking to hire product engineers, developers, quality assurance personnel, customer success and sales team members. Though, Graham said he's also worried if the current job market can support that level of hiring.
The latest infusion builds on $9.3 million in Series A financing that Strivacity took in in 2021, bringing its total funding to date to $31.3 million.