INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Security breaches are a disaster for corporate companies, but good news if you&re someone whooffers preventative solutions
Today in 2018, wide-ranging attacks on the likes of Equifax, Sony Pictures and Target have only added value to those charged with
safeguarding companies.
Balbix, one such solutions provider, has pulled in a $20 million Series B to grow its business and try to prevent
high-profile cybersecurity disasters using a predictive model of measuring and assessing threats.
The round is led bySingtel Innov8, the
corporate fund of Singapore telco Singtel which owns Trustwave and is active in the security space,and Mubadala Ventures, theAbu Dhabi firm
that well known forbackingSoftBank $100 billion Vision Fund
Existing Balbix investor Mayfield Fund also took part alongside angels including ex-Cisco CEO John Chambers, former Cisco EVPPankaj Patel
andentrepreneurs BV Jagadeesh and Gary Gauba.
Balbix raised$8.6 million a year ago when it came out of stealth although the company was
first founded 2.5 years ago by CEO Gaurav Banga (photographed above), who was a founder of Bromium, a fellow security company that has
raised over $115 million from investors.
This time around with Balbix, Banga is turning predictive
The company platform uses a combination of smarts like artificial intelligence and machine learning to essentially map out all potential
vulnerabilities within an organization
That could range from varying operating system version numbers to weak employee passwords, one employee poorly-secured laptop and beyond
The Balbix system plugs into existing operational security products to offer reactive responses andto create a real-time view of an
organization security health and any weaknesses.
&Atenterprise scale, keeping everything up to snuff is very hard,& CEO Gauba told
TechCrunch in an interview
&Most organizations have little visibility into attack surfaces, the right decisions aren&t made and projects aren&t secured.&
&We started
this company so that we could use cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to automatically and comprehensively measure the security and
attack surface, and to produce relevant insights for all stakeholders,& he added
&You look at the numbers and you could easily have hundreds of millions or tens of billions of data points to watch forvulnerabilities —
you have to make sure they are ok.&
The timing certainly seems opportune, with data breaches seemingly in the headlines on a regular basis
In particular, in the case of Equifax, the implications of the attack went to the C-level management and boardroom.
&2017 was special,&Gauba
&Ask any CIO, CEO, or board member of a public company and that was the year that everyone woke up [and]figured their careers were at risk
Itshould have happened before but it took he Equifax breach…they realized this thing is real and it can have a career-altering impact on
their work and personal life.&
&The CSO was always the fall guy before, but now it can go all the way up,& he added
&One of our challenges we face now is how do you answer a board member or CEO questions on security
For us, the answer is simple:if you can&t measure something then you can&t improve it,the right decisions are based on data so go ahead and
find that data.&
Unlike other solutions, Balbix doesn&t charge security companies by the event — aka attacks — so it remains invested in
preventing those kinds of scenarios from happening.
For this round,Gauba said that the company was focused on raising &smart money& that
goes beyond simply providing capital to offer strategic value, too
The company does have international reach in terms of customers — which include bothenterprise customers and global managed security
service providers (MSSP) — and sales but for now its only office is San Jose.
Internationalization is certainly an area where Singtel
Innov8 andMubadala Ventures — located in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, respectively — can lend a hand, and the company itself is
weighing up international offices.
