Bay Dynamics today announced it has raised $23 million in a Series B round of funding, bringing total funding to date for the cyber-risk analytics vendor to $31 million.
The company will use the new funding, which was led by Carrick Capital Partners and included the participation of Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corp., to help accelerate global growth.
“Up until this point, our primary focus has been operating in the U.S,” Feris Rifai, CEO and co-founder at Bay Dynamics, told eWEEK.
Bay Dynamics got its start in 2001 and raised its Series A round of funding in 2014. Rifai said the new Series B funding will help to expand Bay Dynamics’ staffing as well as help it continue to innovate. Part of the investment in innovation includes major enhancements to the company’s Risk Fabric cyber-risk analytics platform. Rifai noted the plan is for Bay Dynamics to release a 5.0 version of its platform within the next three months.
“The updates focus on helping security teams identify, prioritize and mitigate insider and external threats and associated vulnerabilities that impact their most valued information assets,” Rifai said.
He added that the Risk Fabric 5.0 release also will include new capabilities to help engage application and line-of-business leaders to add context to threat alerts. The context includes behavioral-based analytics that will be provided by way of dashboards and automated security metrics to key stakeholders within an organization, so they can make informed decisions to reduce cyber-risk.
Bay Dynamics also partners with technology vendors to provide expanded capabilities. One such partnership is with cloud security vendor Skyhigh Networks, which was announced in November 2015.
Rifai noted Bay Dynamics’ closest competitors are companies that specialize in using user and entity behavior analytics to combat insider threats or those that manage assets at risk. In his view, Bay Dynamics differentiates itself be being able to specialize in both of those categories.
“While Risk Fabric incorporates user and entity behavior analytics [UEBA], it also goes well beyond UEBA,” Rifai said.
UEBA is merely a threat detection technique, he said, and businesses need context around the detected threats to effectively combat insider threats. The additional context includes understanding whether a given threat is tied to a highly valued asset and the probability of a successful attack against that asset.
“Risk Fabric marries that information together and then delivers prioritized threat and vulnerability information to the stakeholders within companies, who can take action to reduce cyber-risk,” Rifai said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.