Digital risk management vendor RiskIQ announced on November 10 that is has raised a $30.5 million Series C round of funding, with Georgian Partners leading the round.
Total funding to date for RiskIQ now stands at $68 million. The new funding will be used to help drive RiskIQ’s engineering and global go-to-market efforts forward.
“What drove us to do the Series C is the tremendous growth in this area, and the limited number of options that CISOs have to solve the problem,” CEO and co-Founder Lou Manousos, told eWEEK. Collecting internet data across web, social and mobile is difficult to do as there is a lot of data to access, but it’s something we’ve been doing for close to seven years.”
In addition to collecting data, RiskIQ also analyzes data, producing the analytics that are needed to detect potential threats. Manousos noted RiskIQ has more than 13,000 users on its platforms.
Among the products that RiskIQ has in market today is PassiveTotal which helps to enable threat investigations. Manousos explained that third-party security tools can plug-into PassiveTotal. The plan moving forward is to work on partnerships with other security vendors to help further enable PassiveTotal.
In Manousos view, external threat vectors remain a primary source of attacks today. His goal for RiskIQ is to be the platform player that can plug-in to multiple areas of security on behalf of customers.
“CISOs need a platform that has flexibility so as a result, we’re doubling down on engineering,” Manousos said.
Looking forward, RiskIQ will be bringing more capabilities into the company’s free community edition. Manousos said that the plan is to take external threat detection capabilities and release it in a community edition and then offer an upgrade path to paid premium editions.
“We believe that every company has a problem with external threats,” Manousos said.
The Community edition is freely available software, but it is not open-source software. Manousos explained that RiskIQ collects deep sources including passive DNS, domain registration, internet scanner data, SSL/TLS data and web crawler data information.
He added that RiskIQ collects all the data, analyzes it and then develops applications on top of the data sets that allow customers to derive insight. Manousos noted that RiskIQ has filed for multiple patents and under-the-hood, what his company continues to innovate on Big Data processes.
“Even if we were to open-source the code, the big problem is you need to have the data,” Manousos said. “When we say community edition, it’s about using our Software-as-a-Service version in a freemium way or as a very inexpensive packaged solution.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.