Cybersecurity startup Infocyte raises $5.2 million in Series B funding to drive continued growth and demand for its flagship product

Cybersecurity startup Infocyte has raised $5.2 million in Series B funding to drive continued company growth and demand for its flagship product.  The company also announced the hiring of Curtis Hutcheson, the former general manager of Dell’s software businesses focused on security as CEO. The current funding round, which brings the cyber threat hunting company’s total investment to $8.6M, was led by Toba Capital with participation from existing investors LiveOak Venture Partners, and Feik Enterprises. The New investment and leadership is expected to drive continued company growth and demand for its flagship dedicated threat hunting and Compromise Assessment platform, Infocyte HUNT.

Founded in 2014 by former US Air Force cybersecurity officers, Christopher Gerritz and Ryan Morris, the San Antonio-based Infocyte develops proactive cyber security solutions designed to identify threats and unauthorized activity on enterprise networks. Through their technology, Infocyte is pioneering the first objective breach discovery assessment that is both fast and affordable enough to perform regularly. Its technology, Pulse Intrusion Assessment Platform, is an agent-less, on-premises appliance that scans network endpoints for the presence of malware or unauthorized activity. The platform departs from traditional intrusion detection methods (i.e. anti-virus) by combining patent-pending memory scanning techniques with signature-less forensic methods typically used in more expensive incident response services. The technology enables a 3rd party to scan a network to discover compromises, malware, and unauthorized activity six times faster than existing methods. Infocyte’s dedicated forensics-based threat hunting platform discovers the post-compromise activity of cyber attackers and malware that have bypassed other defenses. The company’s unique approach to security reduces attacker dwell time to help organizations and independent assessors defend networks and critical information.

“Industry reports continue to show the damage that can be inflicted by an undetected breach in an enterprise network is actually growing rather than shrinking — and the risk extends beyond the business, to insurers and regulators. Infocyte’s unique approach to the problem enables both internal ‘hunt’ teams and independent assessors to quickly find threats hidden within a network. At Toba, we believe this is a key capability missing in the current enterprise security ecosystem, especially as regulation and accountability increase,” said Vinny Smith, founder of Toba Capital.

Threat hunting has rapidly become a hot topic for the security industry. Until now, this practice has been limited to the most sophisticated security professionals in the military and top tier financial institutions who often rely on manual and time-consuming techniques to sift through analytics and behavioral data.

Infocyte HUNT is a dedicated threat hunting platform built by former military threat hunters responsible for protecting the largest and most targeted networks in the world. It leverages military grade techniques and practices in an automated platform to simplify the hunt process, and reduce the skillset requirement for hunting malware and advanced persistent threats (APTs). When prevention and security controls fail, Infocyte HUNT significantly reduces attacker dwell time—the period between infection and discovery—to deny them the ability to persist undetected, reduce business impact, and restore trust in a network’s health.

Mark Grosvenor, CTO of global insurance broker NFP, said, “We have vetted multiple vendors and products over the years and Infocyte HUNT was the first product to truly deliver on its promise of being easy to use and deploy. It has enabled us to proactively search for malware faster and more efficiently across our entire network spanning thousands of nodes and multiple locations.”

Leading Infocyte’s market expansion of its threat hunting technology is new CEO, Curtis Hutcheson. He brings a growth-oriented leadership approach to Infocyte that he has cultivated during his 25+ year career in leading technology companies. Hutcheson was most recently General Manager for Dell Security Software (acquired by Francisco Partners), which included SonicWALL network security. Hutcheson also serves on the board of Interset.

“Infocyte continues to be a leader within the threat hunting community, especially with our proactive use of live, scalable volatile memory forensic techniques. Our intent has always been to greatly simplify the threat hunting process and empower practitioners with varying skill sets to effectively hunt without specialized expertise,” said Chris Gerritz, founder and chief product officer of Infocyte. “The additional capital and new leadership enables Infocyte to scale with the growing demand for Infocyte HUNT, as well as support our growing network of partners offering Compromise Assessments using Infocyte HUNT.”