SOC Prime, an early-stage startup based in Boston, has raised $11 million in Series-A funding.
The investment was led by DNX Ventures, with Rembrandt Venture Partners participating. It will be used to accelerate the adoption of its marketplace, which allows researchers to monetize threat detection codes to aid security teams in defending against cyberattacks.
SOC Prime compares its Detection as Code platform to Spotify for cyber threats. It pulls threat detection content from almost 400 researchers and lets you integrate it into your SIEM or XDR platforms. The platform currently hosts more than 130,000 detections that are aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This is a curated knowledgebase of known adversary tactics, threats, and techniques.
Security researchers are paid a bounty for every use of their content. Subscribers can rate the content and determine how much they receive. TechCrunch reported that researchers made $700 an average in September and that the top performers earn more than $20,000 each year.
The bank's Series A investment will enable the company to increase the bounty by at least five times in the near-term.
Andrii Bezverkhyi is the founder and CEO at SOC Prime. We are proud to support the most talented, bounty-driven threat hunting communities in the threat detection market. They contribute timely and impactful detections that can be used to help organizations adopt a more collaborative defense approach to combat digital threats.
SOC Prime was established by Bezverkhyi and fellow Ukranians Oleksandr Brdikhin and Ruslan Mihailov in 2015. Its purpose is to assist organizations in establishing basic security practices and improving threat visibility in the face a global talent shortage.
The company has seen a 50% increase in premium subscribers, a 86% increase in monthly recurring revenue, and an 85% increase in active customers over the past 12 months. The company's customer base comprises over 6,000 organizations that use its freemium SaaS offering, as well as over 70 paying customers. These include enterprises and public sector organizations from the U.S., EU, and security vendors.
The startup has more than 80 employees, plus the 300 top threat researchers who validate and monetize threat detection codes. The company hopes to have 140 employees by 2022 and more than 900 vetted threat researchers by the end of 2022.
Hiro Rio Maeda is Managing Partner at DNX Ventures. He said: We believe that SOC Prime, just like Netflix and Spotify changed how consumers access music and movies, will revolutionize the way security teams access threat detection content that is essential to protect their organizations.
