Cyphort Inc, based in Santa Clara, has raised $23.7M dollars from Trinity Ventures and others. The company was founded by Ali Golshan and Fengmin Gong, two veterans of the security industry. Fengmin was Chief Scientist at McAfee, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Palo Alto Networks, and Chief Security Content Officer at FireEye. That experience in itself is worth several million dollars in funding. Cyphort offers a software-based, distributed advanced threat defense platform that protects against zero day vulnerabilities, advanced malware, cyber espionage, and advanced persistent threats. Cyphort is both a cloud-based service and software-based product. Cyphort is different from other threat protection platforms in that it charges for its services based on bandwidth, similar to the way some CDNs charge for their WAF service.
Company Background
- Started: 2011
- Raised: $23M
- VC Backers: Trinity Ventures, Matrix Partners & Foundation Capital
- LinkedIn Employee Count: 52
- Founders:Â Ali Golshan (CTO) and Fengmin Gong (Chief Architect)
- Product:Â Advanced Threat Protection Platform helps protect enterprises against zero day vulnerabilities, advanced malware, and advanced persistent threats
- Differentiation:Â Cyphort offers a software-based, distributed service that detects, analyzes, and mitigates threats. Protects physical, virtual machines and cloud infrastructure
- Pricing:Â Pricing based on bandwidth
- Customers:Â Large enterprise, Mid-market and Government Agencies
Cyphort scales easily from one location to several hundred locations, and as a software-based solution, it installs on hardware, VM’s, and cloud infrastructure, enabling the collection of security intelligence from these devices. There is no denying the fact that Cyphort is the right start-up, at the right time, with the right product, and right team, that is going to take this outfit to a very high valuation quickly. Akamai needs to jump on this like there’s no tomorrow, especially since Cyphort bandwidth pricing model fits in nicely with Akamai’s pricing model. With $1B war chest, Akamai needs to acquire a threat protection platform that helps protect against zero day vulnerabilities and APT’s. The acquisition will do two things: take the security fight to FireEyes doorstep, and further collapse the pure-play security and pure-play CDN market into one, and it will fill a hole in Akamai’s security product line.
Features
- Cyphort is a cloud-based and software-based solution that installs on VMs, hardware equipment, and cloud infrastructure
- Cyport is comprised of four pieces: 1) Collectors 2) Core 3) Manager and 4) Threat Network
- Cyphort Collectors: software probe deployed at various network locations, where its main job is to collect security information
- Cyphort Core: detection component that analyzes network data gathered from the collector probes
- Cyphort Manager: web based portal that helps manage the Cyphort platform, and generates reports in the form of threat dashboards
- Cyphort Threat Network: cloud service that aggregates threat data from all Cyphort installations, and feeds this intelligence into the Cyphort Core module which analyzes the data, and makes it actionable