alphaMountain.ai raises $2.7M Seed to provide domain and IP intelligence for cybersecurity investigational and protection platforms

For many years, legacy solutions have struggled to protect enterprises due to low accuracy and poor coverage. Enterprise network security is years behind and most of the technology used by legacy security companies is outdated.

Machine learning algorithms have dramatically improved in the last 5-10 years, but aren’t being utilized across these companies. That’s why alphaMountain.ai, a threat intelligence tech startup is on a mission to provide domain and IP intelligence for cybersecurity investigational and protection platforms.

Today, alphaMountain.ai announced it has received $2.7 million in seed funding led by Mercato Partners’ Prelude Fund. The round will help the company continue developing the company’s threat intelligence, which has already landed several major partner integrations with Cisco SecureX, Cyware, Maltego, and others.

Founded in 2020 by industry veterans John Ahlander (CEO) and Matthew Wood (CTO), the Lake City, Utah-based Alpha Mountain AI provides up-to-date domain and IP intelligence for cybersecurity investigational and protection platforms.

As former Vice President of Product Development and Cloud Operations at Symantec, John Ahlander has decades of experience leading teams in malware defense, web filtering, breach detection, reporting and analytics. Similarly, Matthew Wood has nearly two decades’ experience as a Chief Scientist and Engineering Director for Symantec, Solera Networks, and others, where he was instrumental in building a network forensics platform used by some of the world’s largest organizations.

What is the existing competition missing?

The biggest issue is stale (and inaccurate) classifications, both because of vendors’ inability to refresh their classifications and old technology that hasn’t adapted to the recent trends in websites and malicious actors. Plus, some vendors have significant challenges with geography and language coverage.

Outside of a handful of large security vendors, everyone else in the industry gets this data from a 3rd party. There are only a small number of data providers, but an enormous number of enterprises use this type of data.

What did alphaMountain.ai bring to the table?

alphaMountain.ai’s technology is based on a continuously trained neural network and actor voting system that combines data from threat feeds and real-time user network telemetry. While legacy solutions have struggled to protect enterprises due to low accuracy and poor coverage, this technology provides broad coverage for nearly 1 billion domains and IPs in all geographies and languages, including site malicious risk and web reputation, content classification, and cybersquatting (i.e. phishing) detection.

“What’s unique about alphaMountain – aside from having two of the brightest minds in network security and machine learning at the helm – is that they are actually using AI. Many cyber tools claim to use AI but are actually using static based human authored rules,” said Zach Sivertson, partner at Mercato Partners’ Prelude Fund. “Even at this early stage, alphaMountain.ai’s technology is very impressive, and partners can tell a difference in the quality of data.”

Backed by venture capital cybersecurity experts, the co-founders draw upon decades of artificial intelligence and security experience to bring the latest machine learning techniques to enterprises in search of coverage from the Internet’s malicious actors.

alphaMountain.ai has an enviable investor roster that includes CrossPoint Capital Partners, Andrew Peterson, co-founder at Signal Sciences, and a group of prominent Utah-based investors. Already, the company has gained strong early traction with five major partner integrations, impressive data customers, and technology that scales to billions of lookups per day.

“At Blue Coat Systems, John and Mathew laid the foundation for several web protection tools that
companies still rely on today,” said Greg Clark, Managing Partner of Crosspoint Capital Partners and
former CEO of Blue Coat Systems and Symantec. “Given the relevant experience the founding team has in this critical cybersecurity area, it was an easy decision to back this endeavor. Early results from the intelligence platform are very encouraging.”

alphaMountain.ai has partnered with Cisco to enable security for major events, including Super Bowl LVI (2022) and Black Hat USA (2021). The integration provided threat intelligence to the Cisco SecureX platform used to investigate suspicious activities in the event networks.

“alphaMountain.ai is a valued member of the Cisco Secure Technical Alliance, with their SecureX integration,” said Jessica Bair Oppenhenheimer, director of the Cisco Secure Technical Alliance. “We appreciate their support in securing major events, like the global Black Hat conferences and the NFL’s Super Bowl LVI SOC, where alphaMountain.ai provided full threat intelligence licenses to aid the Cisco teams in protecting the networks.