Israeli cybersecurity startup Hunters secures $15M Series A funding led by Microsoft M12, others to help enterprises speed enterprise breach detection and response

Hunters, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity startup and a provider of SaaS-based autonomous threat hunting solution, today announced it has closed $15 million in Series A funding to boost development of its XDR technology and expand North American operations. Backers include Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Silicon Valley high-tech venture investor U.S. Venture Partners, with participation by seed investors YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital, and Okta Ventures, the venture arm of publicly traded enterprise identity leader, Okta. To date, Hunters has raised a  total of $20.4 million in funding.

Founded two years ago by Tomer Kazaz and Uri May, Hunters is the first autonomous threat hunting solution that searches attack techniques, and finds cyberattacks that bypass security solutions. Hunters combines its unique Attack Intelligence, Hunting AI, and continuous automation with the enterprise’s existing security data to transform threat hunting from hunt and hope to hunting that works. Hunters.AI generates and delivers actionable visualized attack stories allowing organizations to more quickly and effectively identify, understand, and respond to attacks.

Just 18 months after its inception, Hunters is shipping its SaaS-based autonomous threat hunting product to customers that include Snowflake and TripActions, via direct sales and through partner channels like the CrowdStrike Store, and Snowflake Partner Connect. Hunters.AI, the company’s platform, addresses the problem of missed attacks by autonomously detecting attack techniques and correlating them across a multitude of surfaces. Hunters will use the funds to deepen its ongoing ML R&D and further enable customers to extend threat detection with best-of-breed security components.

Industry analysts acknowledge that single-point solutions cannot effectively defend against multi-pronged attacks. Furthermore, the pace and scale of threats outstrip human-led detection and response, and overwhelm SOC team triage with a deluge of alerts and false-positives. This is why the industry is turning toward Extended Detection & Response (XDR) that cuts across all attack surfaces and reduces alert noise.

Hunters’ unique XDR capability picks up weak threat signals hiding in the noise and connects them across sparse and siloed data sources. Its broad, independent ecosystem allows customers to utilize existing security solutions and organizational data sources to detect more threats, faster. By connecting to a wide array of raw data and integrating telemetry across the IT stack, Hunters.AI applies its TTP-based intelligence (tactics, techniques and procedures) to surface potential attack signals, maps them to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and automatically analyzes, enriches and correlates massive volumes of data. It then delivers high confidence attack findings to expedite response by SOC teams, while significantly reducing alert fatigue and false warnings.

Hunters was recently recognized in Gartner’s March 2020 “Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response” report (Gartner subscription required). The report notes, “Extended detection and response describes a unified security incident detection and response platform that automatically collects and correlates data from multiple proprietary security components.”

“To overcome today’s cyber threat landscape, enterprise CISOs need to think like attackers in order to anticipate their moves, and they need to do it at scale. By automating the threat hunting process, Hunters addresses both needs,” said Mony Hassid, General Manager and Managing Director of EMEA, M12. “Hunters has an exceptionally strong team with an intimate understanding of attacker techniques, which is critical in this business.”

“USVP strives to identify market opportunities created by applying novel technology approaches to well understood customer pain points and Hunters XDR is a perfect example,” noted Dr. Jacques Benkoski, Partner at U.S. Venture Partners. “We see an exploding market opportunity in Hunters with its unique ability to derive strong insights from correlation of small signals across diverse telemetry. The company’s emphasis on integration with best-of-breed security systems enables easy customer adoption and the autonomous nature of the system dramatically simplifies detection of ongoing attacks while at the same time reducing the load on overburdened security teams.”

“Okta’s mission is to enable any organization to securely use any technology. Today’s distributed organizations are faced with more security threats than ever before,” said Monty Gray, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at Okta. “Hunters’ diverse XDR ecosystem and unique detection technology offer our joint customers an integrated value, and a resilient security solution to help them overcome these challenges and increase their overall security posture.”

“The Series A investment validates the tremendous progress we’ve made on the technical front with ML and threat research, and commercially with cybersecurity ecosystem partners,” said Uri May, Hunters co-founder and CEO. “We are excited to join the impressive portfolios of M12 and USVP and to be able to leverage the support, experience and networks of these top U.S. venture firms. The participation of cloud-native, enterprise identity leader Okta, via Okta Ventures, is an additional significant vote of confidence in the value Hunters brings to the cybersecurity ecosystem.”