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Security firm Cyberhaven raises $13M Series A with the backing of former Facebook execs

Cyberhaven debuts its first offering: An SaaS-based data analytics approach to security that can help stop the theft of IP and keep track of all enterprise data.
Written by Tom Foremski, Contributor

Cyberhaven said it raised a Series A funding round of $13 million and launched its first computer security product that's based on a DARPA project and using a method it calls Data Behavioral Analysis (DaBA) to identify intrusions and the theft of Intellectual Property (IP).

VC firms Vertex Ventures and Costanoa Ventures led the investment, with additional funds from Crane Venture Partners and angel investors that include Facebook former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, Jeff Rothschild, Veritas' co-founder and Facebook's former VP of infrastructure engineering, and Kamal Shah, a Cloud market pioneer. 

"Our solution makes it easy for enterprises to quickly start protecting their IP and their data because it uses machine learning to identify leaks," said Volodymyr Kuznetsov, co-founder and CEO of Cyberhaven. "If a breach occurs we can show how it happened. Just his feature alone saves huge amounts of time in forensic analysis."

Kuznetsov said the technology grew out of a project that won $1 million in a DARPA competition in 2016. He and his four co-founders are top security researchers from Stanford University, MIT, EPFL, and UC Berkeley. He claims a unique approach that gives enterprises a real-time analysis of the location and movement of all the data inside the enterprise and how it is being used.

The company's goal is to build out its technologies so that when a breach occurs it can be used as the primary source for investigating data exfiltration -- instead of sourcing logs from multiple enterprise security products to determine the exact path data took out of the organization. Forensic analysis that can take weeks to complete can be done in just a few hours.

This is a change from companies having to add yet another computer security product when new risks arise in enterprise IT environments. 

Protecting a company's IP has become a top issue, as countries such as China have been accused of stealing valuable IP from US and European companies via state-sponsored hacking teams. 

"With our approach, there is no need to create security policies or have specialist knowledge of your data -- we do it all automatically," said Kuznetsov. "We enable companies to contain data loss at machine speed." 

There is a well-documented shortage of skilled cybersecurity workers in the US. Computer technologies that learn from their environment without relying on specialists to set up and run have the potential to lessen the impact of the shortage of computer security experts in large companies. 

The Cyberhaven technology is SaaS-based and pricing is on an annual basis according to department size.

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