Reston cybersecurity firm Silent Push Inc. is coming out of stealth mode with a $10 million seed round to bring its proactive cybersecurity software to a wider market by ramping up hiring for sales and marketing.
The company was founded three years ago by CEO Ken Bagnall and CTO John Jensen to research a way to detect cyberattackers building malicious cyberinfrastructure, such as false domains or automated IP address rotation systems, and then stop breaches before they happen.
“Threat intelligence has struggled to make the impact it should have made. That’s why we took this on,” Bagnall said. “We spent three years building this. It's the largest data collection platform in our industry. We have a global early warning system where we detect changes across the internet every day.”
Bagnall said the goal of the new funding is to increase the visibility of the Silent Push's cybersecurity product and get it into the hands of companies beyond “the elite minority of companies who already have mature security teams.”
It is the scale of Silent Push's data collection and its shift from the norm of warning companies about cyberthreats after an attack happens that made the company an attractive target for Boston cybersecurity investor Ten Eleven Ventures, which led the reed round.
Dave Palmer, general partner at Ten Eleven Ventures, said in a statement Silent Push's "totally new approach" to how signals are gathered gives its threat intelligence a leg up on competitors.
Bagnall said for normal security products, there's a gap between the threats companies are looking for, what they're detecting and the changing tactics threat actors are utilizing.
“It's up to us as intelligence companies to step into that breach, find the new techniques that [attackers are] using, identify those gaps and then provide that information to customers," Bagnall said. "That's what threat intelligence is supposed to be.”
Bagnall declined to discuss revenue or specific clients, but said Silent Push is well into the post-revenue stage as a company and has is employed by some of the largest security vendors and companies.
Both Bagnall and Jensen were previously executives at California cybersecurity firm company FireEye Inc., as vice president of email security product and research labs director, respectively. The duo's last company, The Email Laundry, was acquired by FireEye, which has long had a presence in Greater Washington.
Silent Push has 30 employees and, as it seeks to expand its marketing and sales team, Bagnall said it will focus on hiring in Northern Virginia because of the high volume of threat intelligence companies in the area. The company is fully remote, so Bagnall doesn’t expect an expansion of office space.
