Dragos, a Global Industrial Control System Cybersecurity Startup, Raises $10 Million in Series A Venture Capital
(Thomson Reuters ONE) -
Funding Provided by Energy Impact Partners, Allegis Capital and DataTribe
Dragos Is Building the First Industrial Cybersecurity Ecosystem
HANOVER, Md., Aug. 14, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dragos Inc., (pronounced Dray-
gohs), an industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity company made up of
industry experts with the vision of securing global industrial infrastructure,
announced today that it has received a $10 million Series A round of venture
capital from co-lead investors Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and Allegis Capital,
with additional support from DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup studio that
initially funded Dragos.
The Series A round will be used to increase the company's workforce to meet
rising customer demand, generated in part through key partnerships with
Deloitte, the global audit and financial advisory services firm, and CrowdStrike
Inc., a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection.
Dragos is the first ICS cybersecurity investment by EIP, which focuses on
investments that seek to optimize energy consumption and improve sustainable
energy generation.
CRASHOVERRIDE AND DRAGOS REPORT
Dragos has attracted attention for recently producing a report on CRASHOVERRIDE,
the malware used to temporarily interrupt power in the Ukraine in a widely
publicized cyber-attack last December. CRASHOVERRIDE is the only known malware
that disrupts the electrical grid and only the fourth known type of malware to
be specifically tailored toward ICS overall.
Founded May 2016 and funded until this point with a seed round of $1.2 million
from DataTribe, Dragos has built the first industrial cybersecurity ecosystem.
This consists of three core offerings and an assessment tool - the Dragos
Platform, the Dragos Threat Operations Center, Global ICS Intelligence, and
CyberLens network assessment software. This combination gives customers access
to technology to monitor and respond to threats in the ICS, along with
intelligence to make informed decisions about threats. Services range from
threat hunting to incident response, as well as lightweight software for routine
assessments.
The company's biggest technological differentiator is its behavioral analytics.
Instead of "anomaly detection" and other types of machine learning-driven
technologies that are hitting the market, the approach of Dragos is to codify
human experience facing human adversaries. It identifies adversary tradecraft
and turns it into behavioral analytics. As a result, defenders get context of
what is going on and recommendations on what to do next, not merely a series of
alerts.
"Dragos exists to safeguard civilization," said Robert M. Lee, the CEO of
Dragos. "Critical infrastructure powers the global economy and the fabric of
modern society. We all strongly believe that civilian infrastructure should be
off limits to any adversaries, no matter where the infrastructure is located in
the world."
Dragos was founded by ICS cybersecurity experts Lee, Jon Lavender and Justin
Cavinee, all veterans of the U.S. intelligence community. There they established
a first-of-its-kind mission for the U.S. government to identify, analyze and
respond to nation-states launching ICS-focused cyberattacks.
"Industrial control systems are unique unto themselves - hybrid digital and
analog environments with very different operational temperaments," said Bob
Ackerman, the founder and a Managing Director of cybersecurity investment
specialist Allegis Capital. "Unless you have lived your life in this
environment, you can't truly appreciate how different or complex ICS systems
are. With Dragos, we invested in the "A" team."
"Protecting the integrity of the grid has always been a top priority for utility
operators," said Sameer Reddy, a Vice President at EIP and co-leader of the
Series A financing. "One of the critical challenges is access to sufficient
human capital. The Dragos platform, which is built and managed by true ICS
cybersecurity experts, provides significant force multiplication to ICS
operators around the world."
"Energy is essential to our economy and way of life. As a result, energy
infrastructure is increasingly a target," said Thomas A. Fanning, Chairman,
President and CEO of Southern Company. "As a founding investor in Energy Impact
Partners, Southern Company is proud to support enhancing the resiliency of
critical infrastructure, in order to better protect the communities where we
live and serve."
About Dragos Inc.
Dragos Inc., based in Hanover, Md., is the trusted authority on threats to
industrial networks (ICS/IoT). The Dragos Platform is an on-premise or cloud-
based security technology that continually and passively collects data to
perform asset identification, detects cyber threats through industrial specific
behavioral analytics, and enables better efficiency and effectiveness of
security personnel through the codification of automated workflows, best
practices and incident response procedures. The Dragos Platform is continually
enhanced through the Dragos Threat Operations Center, a team of experts
providing services that include incident response, threat hunting, and
compromise assessments. Both are backed by Dragos Intelligence, which allows for
the analysis of adversary intrusions and provides the industry with weekly
threat intelligence reports and adds new behavioral analytics to the Dragos
Platform. For more information, visit https://dragos.com.
About Energy Impact Partners
Energy Impact Partners is a collaborative strategic investment firm that invests
in companies optimizing energy consumption and improving sustainable energy
generation. Through close collaboration with its strategic investor base, EIP
seeks to bring the best companies, buying power and vision in the industry to
bear on the emerging energy landscape. EIP's utility partners include Southern
Company, National Grid, Xcel Energy, Ameren, Great Plains Energy, Fortis Inc.,
AGL, Avista, MGE Energy Inc., TEPCO, PTT Public Company Limited, OGE Energy
Corp., TransCanada, and Alliant Energy. For more information,
visit www.energyimpactpartners.com.
About Allegis Capital
Allegis Capital is a premier, early-stage venture firm that invests solely in
cybersecurity and was the first venture fund to focus strictly on cyber. In
addition to Dragos, current investments include Area 1, Bracket Computing,
Callsign, Cyber GRX, E8 Security, RedOwl, Shape Security, Signifyd, Synack,
tCell.io and vArmour. Allegis is also a founding partner in DataTribe, a
cybersecurity startup studio based in Fulton, Maryland. Allegis Capital is based
in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.allegiscap.com or Twitter at
(at)AllegisCapital.
About DataTribe
DataTribe, based in Fulton, Maryland, and Silicon Valley, is a cybersecurity
startup studio formed with the mission of combining breakthrough innovation in
cybersecurity, Big Data and analytics. The technological base of its startups
emerge from federal agencies, such as the National Security Agency, or from
government research labs. DataTribe draws upon Silicon Valley start-up
expertise to help create, define and lead new market segments. As an operating
company, it directly takes on the task of building startups from concept to
initial customer deployments while significantly lowering risk and preserving
returns. For more information, visit www.datatribe.com.
For media inquiries, contact Jennifer Jones at jennifer(at)jenniferjones.com.
Cell: 650-465-5831
This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.
The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.
Source: Dragos via GlobeNewswire
Datum: 14.08.2017 - 13:30 Uhr
Sprache: Deutsch
News-ID 556420
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