Venari Security raises Series A funding

Venari Security, the defender of encrypted networks, has raised a Series A funding of £4.2m with a post money valuation of £14.2m. With some of the best known and most influential figures in the cybersecurity industry onboard including Paddy McGuinness, the UK’s former Deputy National Security Adviser for Intelligence, Security and Resilience; Lane Bess, former President and Chief Executive Officer of Palo Alto Networks; and Cris Conde, former Chief Executive Officer of Sungard, the company is primed for success by fundamentally transforming organisations’ ability to accurately and quickly spot threats concealed in encrypted traffic.

In a world where privacy is demanded by customers and mandated by regulators, encryption has become the norm. But it’s become a major target for cybercriminals. In 2020, Cisco estimated that as much as 70% of all malware campaigns would use some type of encryption to conceal malware delivery, enabling malicious communications to sneak past network defences and extract data through encrypted channels.

Unlike traditional solutions that require communications to be decrypted to accurately identify abnormal activity, Venari uses a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and behavioural analytics to accurately detect threats on the network in near real-time, without the need for decryption. This significantly reduces the response time of security teams and enables them to proactive respond to threats rather than react to events, while delivering internal and regulatory compliance for organisations.

The business will be led by CEO Tom Millar, former Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ITC Secure; Chief Revenue Officer Hiten Mistry, former banking lead architect and senior figure at several cyber security start-ups, and Chief Technology Officer Simon Mullis, former Technical Director EMEA at Tanium.

The company will use the investment to grow its Research & Development, data science and cyber teams, complete its Go-To-Market plan and continue to attract some of the best cyber talent to achieve its aggressive growth plans.

Tom Millar, Chief Executive Officer at Venari Security, comments: 

"We are now in a world where the majority of business communication uses encryption both internally and externally, which is a good thing. However, over the past five years, cybercriminals have pivoted and use those same encryption protocols to circumvent traditional security technologies, allowing attackers to deliver malware and ransomware attacks, communicate laterally within the enterprise and exfiltrate data. Organisations are more concerned than ever about protecting their customer's privacy but struggle to defend effectively against attacks."

"That's why we've built Venari. We're backed and advised by some of the world's leading cybersecurity and compliance experts who believe strongly in our ability to solve a genuine, immediate problem for enterprises and our development partners include large global organisations across key regulated verticals. The response has been tremendous, helping validate the need for encrypted traffic analysis, reducing the time to react for security teams and ensuring these organisations meet their certificate compliance standards. We are just getting started and have some fantastic innovations planned for encrypted traffic analysis."