Query.AI raises $4.6M to scale its go-to-market and engineering teams to meet demand for its platform

Query.AI launched with $4.6 million in seed funding from ClearSky Security, DNX Ventures, and South Dakota Equity Partners. The company will use the funding to scale its go-to-market and engineering teams to meet significant demand for its platform. As part of Query.AI’s launch, Jay Leek, the former CISO of Blackstone, is joining the company’s board of directors.

Query.AI is founded by Dhiraj Sharan and Andrew Maloney, former engineering and product leaders from Niara and JASK, and backed by the founders of ArcSight, CipherCloud, and Verodin. The platform provides security teams with a simple and cost-effective approach to significantly elevate security investigation and response through real-time access and centralized insights to data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS applications, without duplicating it from its native locations.

“Digital transformation is occurring at an unprecedented pace. Organizations are adopting new technologies to modernize their infrastructure and digitize workflows to meet customer needs. Yet a rising challenge facing security teams is that it’s no longer files or systems that get compromised – it’s entire enterprises,” said Jay Leek, managing partner and co-founder of ClearSky Security, Query.AI’s lead seed investor.

“The Query.AI platform delivers enhanced speed and visibility by unifying existing security solutions for a much more intuitive and immediate investigations experience. It accesses information where it lives, leveraging native data located in other systems for instant analysis without the need to manually identify, index, and store information. The opportunity to help Query.AI scale is a terrific one for ClearSky Security.”

Through a privacy-by-design approach and patented browser-based architecture, Query.AI simultaneously normalizes and enriches data across any platform, including SIEM, SOAR, and XDR, to enable investigations without complexity. The security investigations control plane provides guided data exploration and support for natural language processing to eliminate the need for security analysts to be experts in individual systems and give organizations the flexibility to determine where their data is stored and who has access.

“With Query.AI we’ve been able to federate our investigations across a disparate toolset and automate workflows to enrich data with real-time correlations in support of our incident response processes,” said Carl Steeves, VP of information security operations at Fox Corporation. “Query.AI has enabled us to put a wider set of tools, and the data they hold, at the fingertips of our incident responders.”

With growing data volumes across an enterprise’s on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments, as well as security solutions charging by data ingestion, Query.AI delivers an effective way to speed security investigation and response goals while simultaneously reducing costs.

“Visibility and investigation speed are critical for security teams, and the greatest challenge with legacy solutions is the amount of data that needs to be duplicated from different locations,” said Dhiraj Sharan, founder and CEO of Query.AI. “Query.AI solves this because it pulls the data from where it lives, providing unparalleled access to data in real time. By directly leveraging the ecosystem of industry vendors’ APIs, Query.AI removes the burden of transferring or duplicating data to consolidate control and enable swift investigations and response actions.”

According to a recent Ponemon survey, 80% of security operation center managers say the complexity of their SOC is very high and diminishing their return on investments. Query.AI employs an index-aware approach to centrally access data stored across multiple platforms to extract greater value from existing investments.

“With the use of Query.AI, our firm is able to centralize access and analyze data to enable faster, higher-confidence outcomes,” said Joe Oney, security operations manager at Hogan Lovells. “Incident response teams are struggling to keep up with the expanding types, and sources, of data available during the early stages of identification and triage. Query.AI is helping to solve the issues around the expanding complexity of modern IT environments, and the often negative corollary effects on analysts. Query.AI has given us a glimpse into the future of security investigations.”