Halcyon, a cybersecurity startup founded by veterans Jonathan Miller and Ryan Smith of Optiv, Blackberry, and cyber defense company Boldend, recently announced that they had secured a $44 million Series A funding round (plus $6 million in debt) led by SYN Ventures and Corner Ventures, with Dell Technologies Capital joining in. This massive investment came just a few months after the infamous Colonial Pipeline incident which caused Jon Miller and Ryan Smith to question why ransomware is still growing exponentially, despite the widespread adoption of modern security tools.
The new funds will be put towards bolstering Halcyon’s engineering and R&D teams as well as expanding their sales and marketing outreach. Building off its patent-pending AI systems, Halcyon offers a unique solution to protect against ransomware. It uses its AI to recognize signs of malicious intent and is trained on a dataset of millions of real ransomware events. Additionally, their resilience layer captures encryption keys generated during an attack, allowing for easy endpoints decryption to render the attack useless.
The cybersecurity industry has been hit hard in the last few years with consistent drops in investment, resulting in a two-year low for dealmaking in the most recent fiscal quarter according to Crunchbase. However, even amidst this financial crunch, Halcyon has managed to gain traction and raise $50 million since their founding in 2020. With 51 customers using their platform, they plan to grow their workforce to 100 people by the end of the year and launch a data exfiltration tool to protect against double extortion. Moreover, they plan to add support for more operating systems such as Linux and Mac.
Jon Miller, Halcyon’s CEO, views their products as unique and wants to enhance the benefits of other security tools on the market. Halcyon’s success speaks to industry demand. Studies show that 75% of companies wouldn’t be able to endure a ransomware attack, and 47% of companies have experienced a successful ransomware attack. Thanks to Halcyon’s innovative platform, companies now have an effective way to protect against cybercrime and lower their recovery times.
