Israel’s cybersecurity startup CyVers secures $8M Seed funding to make Web3 and crypto exchanges safer

The wild news coming out of the crypto market triggered by the collapse of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has had a negative impact on the overall traders’ confidence. The scandal has reignited the calls for increased regulations in the crypto industry and the emerging Web3 space.

But solving the trust problem requires more than just government-mandated regulations. Jittery customers also want to ensure their digital assets on exchanges are safe. That’s why one tech startup has come up with a new way to protect blockchain networks.

Enter CyVers, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity startup and a leading provider of proactive Web3 Security for the centralized, decentralized finance and smart contract applications via detection and interception of crypto attacks across blockchains.

Today, CyVers announced it has raised $8 million in seed funding to protect against fraudulent cryptocurrency purchases before reaching the ledger. What makes this critical is that in 98% of the cases, crypto exchanges, DeFi protocols, and custodians are not alerted about the fraud until after it has been immutably registered.

The round was led by Elron Ventures, with participation from Crescendo Venture Partners, Differential Ventures, HDI, Cyber Club London, and Cyber Future.

CyVers was founded earlier this year by experienced entrepreneurs, Deddy Lavid, who holds 11 patents in automated anomaly detection, sold his start-up, Presenso, to SKF as founder & CTO and later served as the CEO of the Israeli subsidiary, where he led hundreds of engineers and dozens of AI products. Meir Dolev led a start-up as CTO and later served as VP of R&D for the acquirer.

The startup is developing agentless, plug-and-play, scalable, and highly accurate solutions to detect suspicious behavior. This allows CyVers to capture transactions during the few moments between the time a transaction is broadcasted and when it is registered irreversibly to a blockchain ledger.

Two years ago, Meir joined Deddy to revolutionize the analytics space and establish four global development centers. CyVers has already secured customers such as Bit2C, Solidus Capital, and CoinMama, among others.

In a statement, Bit2C CEO Eli Bejerano said,  “The profiles of our customers require absolute security, and CyVers provides excellent alerts about malicious activity.”

Since the 2020 crypto rush, the market has been struggling with liquidity, volatility, and a lack of trader trust. This year alone, cross-chain bridge hacks have accounted for 69% of the total crypto funds stolen, amounting to $3.5 billion in losses YTD. In 98% of the cases, crypto exchanges, DeFi protocols, and custodians are not alerted about the fraud until after it has been immutably registered.

“CyVers’ platform collects cross-blockchain data, streaming it to our sophisticated monitoring system,” said Meir Dolev, Co-founder & CTO. “Our analytics engine predicts evolving attacks while autonomously understanding attacker behaviors. These include smart contract exploits, private key leakage, Flashloans, etc. Once it detects the evolution of an exploit pattern, the AI system generates alerts while providing enough time to act and the best-known solution, before the exploitation and money laundering progresses.”

Moving away from blacklists, code auditing, and fund tracing, CyVers identifies cyber-attacks and carries out corrective measures within milliseconds.

“We screened many teams in the web3 cybersecurity space. We feel privileged to partner with Deddy and Meir, second-time entrepreneurs that blend expertise from blockchain security with graph neural networks, and DeFi trading. CyVers will dramatically reduce the number of attacks and bring a safer crypto economy,” said Elik Etzion, Managing Partner at Elron Ventures. “Together, we are enabling a world of a trustworthy and transparent Web3.”