Annapolis-based cybersecurity company Netography announced Monday it secured $45 million in Series A funding. The funding round was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and SYN Ventures with participation from some of Netography’s existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, Harpoon Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.
Netography claims that its network detection and response SaaS is the only product on the market built to secure “atomized networks” — the combined cloud, on-premise and legacy infrastructures that comprise most of today’s enterprise networks. The software ingests network metadata from multiple systems and enriches it to increase data visibility and make attack detection easier to manage. It also provides integrations to block, reroute, orchestrate and inform or alert when attacks on networks occur.
Netography’s leaders aren’t new to the world of cybersecurity by any means. In fact, its CEO and co-founder are pioneers in the industry. Netography’s CEO Martin Roesch —who was appointed to the role in September — founded network security firm Sourcefire, which was later acquired by Cisco in 2013. Co-founder Barrett Lyon created The Opte Project in 2003, the first open internet map project now part of catalogs at the Boston Museum of Science and The Museum of Modern Art.
The two cybersecurity experts say a lot has changed since their heyday. The introduction of technology like the cloud, anti-malware and Bitcoin have presented both opportunities for innovation and challenging vulnerabilities. Lyon said the latter is probably the biggest change that has negatively affected cybersecurity in the past decade.
“It’s making it profitable to do bad things and it makes it easy to get paid to do these bad things anonymously,” Lyons said of Bitcoin in a company video. “There’s value to hacking and as a result there’s more of it. … People are making millions of dollars and they’re trying harder which means we need to do a better job with the technology.”
A lot has changed in cybersecurity, but Roesch said there’s still a lot that hasn’t, which is why he decided to re-enter the industry after his temporary departure in 2019.
“I was stricken by how much opportunity there still is here. ... The ways that we’re doing security are still in a lot of ways mired in the old way of doing things on appliances and doing big, deep packet inspection and things of that nature,” Roesch said in the video.
Netography now has the means to make changes to atomized network security and move enterprises away from old practices Roesch says makes companies vulnerable. The fresh funding will be used to build out the company’s team and develop new tech innovations and enhancements.
With the new funding, the company also brings Ben Holladay as chief revenue officer and Dan Ramaswami as VP of field engineering. The new executive roles were added in order to capitalize on strong market demand for Netography’s offerings.
