Pente nabs $ 60 million to an evaluation of $ 1 billion + to build simulated network attacks to train the security teams
Solid and intelligent safety operations teams are at the heart of any cybersecurity strategy, and today a startup that builds tools to help them keep their guards announces funding on the back of a lot of growth. Poven – Who has built a system that launches network attack simulations to highlight test software and human response – announces funding of $ 60 million, a series D which values the startup founded in Tel Aviv based in Boston at more than a billion dollars.
Funding will be used for mergers and acquisitions and to continue to develop products, said CEO AMITAI RATZON in an interview.
Pentera is a game on the term “pen test”, which is abbreviated for penetration tests, programs that have been designed to help unravel security teams on potential attack techniques. This is indeed what Pente has built to a degree developed in a product which is officially described as “automated security validation”.
“We provide companies and governments with technology that, with one button, can launch a mega attack against themselves, and with another click, the engineering goes back in the bottle,” said Ratzon. “The beautiful thing is that everything is certain by design.”
And unlike, let’s say, a fire exercise in an office, the simulated sloping attacks are carried out in a way the rest of the organization outside the security team is not wiser – a bit like many actual security violations in fact.
La Ronde arrives in the heels of Pentea growing customers from 200% to 1,100 organizations and 300% in the past four years, highlighting the demand on the market of its tools.
Evolution Equity Partners directs the Tour, with Farallon Capital participating. Before that, the company had raised $ 190 million in a combination of primary and secondary capital, according to Manual. His other investors include Insight, K1 and Blackstone.
The climb of Pentea arrives at a time of a lot of automation in the world of cybersecurity.
The world of cybersecurity has been practically ambushed by the arrival of AI, which is used both by malicious pirates to violate systems, and also by a wide range of tools to help identify and stop these attacks on their tracks.
Pente takes into account this swing in AI as part of its platform. When it launches attacks, it does it around specific vulnerabilities and, in the process, identifies the different areas of the network of an organization that could be exploited.
As a rule, this could throw up to 10,000 alerts, said Ratzon.
To be fair, an overwhelming number of alerts in live products is a classic problem with many safety tools, and a number of startups also attack this problem. In the case of Pentera, it automatically takes 10,000 and reduces it to six or eight deep causes or usable vulnerabilities, he said, then provides suggestions on how to repair them, then leaves this to the teams to manage.
“Pentera has redefined security and business validation test practices,” said Richard Seewald, Director Partner at Evolution Equity Partners, in a statement. “The exceptional growth of Pentera, a strong business adoption and innovation defining the categories clearly make it the leader in automated security validation. We are proud to direct this investment and continue our relationship with Pentea because it is evolving globally, expands its technology and continues to define the standard of industry for the validation of security. »»
