Former Splunk CTO Teams Up with Former U.S. Special Operations Cyber Operator to Deliver Autonomous Pentesting
Horizon3.ai, a cybersecurity startup focused on autonomous penetration testing, today announced $30M in funding. Co-founded by former Splunk CTO, Snehal Antani, and Anthony Pillitiere, former Deputy CTO within the U.S. Special Operations Command, Horizon3.ai delivers continuous, autonomous penetration testing, enabling companies to see their networks through the eyes of an attacker. This helps organizations to proactively find and fix attack vectors before criminals can exploit them. Led by SignalFire, the investments enable the company to accelerate its product roadmap and go-to-market strategy.
“Our product, NodeZero, was able to obtain Domain Administrator access in the network of a banking customer in 7 minutes and 19 seconds using the same techniques utilized in ransomware attacks. This customer had all the latest security tools installed, yet no security alerts were triggered, because these tools require significant tuning and were not designed to work together. Our customers were frustrated because they had to wait for a breach to test their security operations center; by then it’s too late. They now use NodeZero as a ‘sparring partner’ to help verify their security effectiveness.” – Snehal Antani, CEO and co-founder, Horizon3.ai
The significant growth of the global security testing market, forecasted to surpass $27B by 2027 with a 20.7% CAGR, reflects the importance organizations place on effectively managing vulnerabilities and their associated risks. Issues arise when companies run their pentests, vulnerability scanners, and other legacy assessment services, which often result in thousands of ‘critical’ findings that leave security teams overwhelmed and unable to prioritize, given limited time and resources. This is especially painful in enterprises with footprints spanning on-premise and cloud services. In fact, reports show less than 2% of identified vulnerabilities are actually exploitable, and less than 0.5% of vulnerabilities get exploited.
“Our customers shift from running one pentest per year to as many as 16 pentests per month. They are empowered to find exploitable security weaknesses, fix the issues that truly matter, and then quickly verify that the weakness is no longer exploitable. This ‘Find, Fix, Verify’ loop is our ‘AHA moment!’ Once our customers hit this cycle, they never look back. NodeZero doesn’t require any agents to be installed or any scripts to be developed. IT Admins with no security experience are running self-service pentests in 3 clicks.” – Anthony Pillitiere, CTO and co-founder, Horizon3.ai
“Vulnerability scanning, pentesting, breach and attack simulation, and attack surface management are security categories ripe for disruption. These siloed, legacy solutions generate a lot of false positives and require significant expertise because they weren’t designed to work together. We are proud to lead the investment with Horizon3.ai, We know their approach – creating a proactive security posture – will drastically help companies catch up, keep up and even stay ahead of today’s threat landscape.” – Ilya Kirnos, Founding Partner at SignalFire
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