A new Seattle-area startup is using artificial intelligence to help overwhelmed security teams identify high priority security flaws and mitigate threats.
Averlon just raised $8 million in a seed round led by Seattle-based Voyager Capital, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Outpost Ventures, and several prominent security execs.
Averlon co-founders Sunil Gottumukkala and Vishal Agarwal previously led engineering teams at Salesforce, where the longtime tech leaders experienced the problem they’re now trying to solve.
Software products that help companies identify security issues and vulnerabilities are better than ever. But they have also created a problem — security teams are inundated with more alerts than they can handle. And it’s not always clear which alerts should be prioritized.
The deluge of notifications can also result in friction between security and engineering teams.
Averlon uses a combination of predictive and generative AI to assess a company’s security vulnerabilities and map out how a bad actor might infiltrate their systems.
“We’re finding that needle in the haystack that actually is going to cause a potential breach, and we’re helping fix it,” Gottumukkala told GeekWire.
There are plenty of existing security products on the market that can alert companies to potential vulnerabilities, Gottumukkala said. But not many can both scope out the most pressing threats and also help eliminate them.
“We haven’t seen anything in the market that comes anywhere close to what we can do,” Gottumukkala said.
Gottumukkala was a senior vice president in cybersecurity for five years at Salesforce and previously spent 16 years at Microsoft. Agarwal was senior vice president of software engineering at Salesforce and also spent 16 years at Microsoft.
The rush of AI and generative AI technologies is sparking concerns about cybersecurity, with both security experts and hackers taking advantage of new capabilities.
Gottumukkala said he’s optimistic about how generative AI can help companies defend themselves.
“Generative AI capabilities will be available to everybody,” he said. “But defenders have context and the data that is specific to their environment.”
Averlon was founded two years ago and has been working with early partners, some of which are now paying customers. Total funding for the 12-person company is $10.5 million.
“Averlon is a powerful platform that allows enterprises to map exactly how an attacker can compromise an environment,” Voyager Capital Partner Austin Guyette said in a statement. “By understanding the attacker’s view, Averlon gives CISOs and their teams unparalleled ability to prioritize what an attacker can explore or exploit to pinpoint threats, predict attacks, and to mitigate them.”
Other Seattle-area cybersecurity startups including Dropzone AI, Oleria, and StepSecurity recently raised funding. Cybersecurity startups raised nearly $2.7 billion in 154 deals in the first quarter, slightly down year-over-year, but up 69% from the fourth quarter of 2023, according to Crunchbase.
Related: Generative AI is a dual concern for cybersecurity industry — and will drive increased labor demand
