StrikeReady raises $3.6M to accelerate go-to-market and sales, grow the R&D team

The seed round was led by 11.2 Capital, with participation from Outlier Venture Capital and multiple Silicon Valley angel investors. The funds will be used to accelerate go-to-market and sales, and grow the R&D team.

StrikeReady has built a cloud based security operations and management platform that maximizes return on organizations’ existing security investments – people, process and products.

The platform integrates, operationalizes, optimizes and consolidates disparate security products, and assists and empowers cybersecurity teams.

The convergence of AI, data and automation helps the defenders to quickly respond to incidents, proactively defend against emerging threats, and / or operate at lightning speed.

After decades of experience in cybersecurity and talking to hundreds of cybersecurity analysts and CISOs, the StrikeReady team identified three key problems to modernize security operations.

• Cybersecurity skill gap: Every security team struggles with the deep understanding of every cybersecurity vendor’s product’s granular capabilities, its strengths and its weaknesses. And it’s pretty evident that there are too many tools and a massive overlap among them. In addition, the adversary always finds a new way to attack and only post attack the new technique, tactic or methodology is discovered.
• Cybersecurity talent shortage: The majority of security leaders struggle to fill open cybersecurity positions, and even if they do, they tend to experience a massive churn due to analyst burnout. Security practitioners are continuously bombarded with alerts and get no appreciation for the work they do, hence they leave.
• Collaboration issue: Each organization splits their cybersecurity department into various teams such as SOC team, DFIR team, Red Team, Threat Intel team and so on. Knowledge sharing between the teams barely exists; forget about sharing knowledge between organizations within the same industry or among organizations all across the world.

StrikeReady reimagined a solution and built it from the ground up to address the pressing needs of the defenders – be it a SOC Analyst, an Incident Responder, a Threat Intel analyst, a Threat Hunter, a Red Teamer, a Security Engineer, and more.

The core capabilities of the product are as follows:

• It helps enhance the skill of the defender while they perform their day-to-day task.
• It guides and accelerates the time it takes to perform any task, regardless of which team the defender belongs to – SOC, Threat Intel, Threat Hunting, Incident Response, Security Engineering, etc.
• It keeps itself up-to-date and in real-time shares the knowledge and the skills that it has learnt from intuitional knowledge and practical experiences of the defenders across the world.

“Assume you’re going to get breached – is the new normal for the cybersecurity industry since bad actors are scaling their attacks through automation, and organizations need to adopt a similar approach.

“Convergence of AI, knowledge, and automation is a must to improve security analysts’ productivity and abridge their skill gap. StrikeReady’s founders, Yasir and Anurag, have deep domain expertise in security operations and AI-powered automation.

“They have built a unique product that accelerates incident investigation, automates response, imparts knowledge and proactively secures the organization. 11.2 Capital is excited to support the team’s mission in bringing Security Operations into the future,” said Pramod Gosavi, Principal, 11.2 Capital.

The StrikeReady team is led by Yasir Khalid, formerly an engineering leader and an architect of core detection technologies at FireEye, where he spent ten years and his work led to over fifteen cybersecurity patents, and supported by CPO, Anurag Gurtu, formerly head of security product marketing (UEBA) at Splunk, and prior to that head of technical marketing at FireEye and product management at Cisco.

The majority of the talent at StrikeReady are all early timers from FireEye, who have had extensive experience working on various security stacks – network security, endpoint security, email security, cloud security and automation.

This ex-FireEye team was instrumental in handling threat research, threat intelligence, R&D, engineering and sales. In less than two years, the team has successfully deployed the product at multiple mid and large enterprises and government agencies in the United States and internationally.

“If we look at the state of cybersecurity today, we never had so many security tools at our disposal. These tools range from next-generation detection or prevention technology, framework, and security awareness technology to threat intelligence product and more.

“All these technologies provide unprecedented insights into the attacker and their workings. Yet, the organizations have only been able to improve their security posture slightly.

“And this validates our thesis – the problem is cybersecurity skill-gap, talent shortage and lack of collaboration.

“Our vision is to take a human-centered approach to make the security team effective and exceptionally efficient, while transforming all the cybersecurity analysts to be an expert, and without off-the-job training,” said Yasir Khalid, Founder and CEO of StrikeReady.