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It appears that investments in cybersecurity companies are starting to come at the crossroads.
Despite a tough summer, total venture capital investment to security start-ups grew from approximately $1.7 billion to almost $1.9 billion in Q3 according to Crunchbase, representing a small increase of 12%. That’s still down 30% annually. However, it’s just a mild indication that ventures hunger for cyber is once again on the rise.
The reasons may include increasing expenditures on enterprise cyber security among other factors.
As noted in an IANS Research brief, corporate IT security spending increased by about six percent from 2022 to 2023 – only marginally meaningful. Accordingly, most of the respondents pointed out to “increased risk” and “digital transformation.” That is, digitizing legacy apps, products and services.
This helps one startup called Censys that offers insights on vital internet-connected infrastructure that are of interest to customers. Censys today revealed that it secured $50M in Series C financing and another $25M debt round, resulting in a cumulative figure of $178.1 million of funds raised.
Censys traces back to ZMap invented by the organization’s chief scientist Durumeric in 2013. In 2015, after understanding that this program can be used for enhancing instead of monitoring the states of insecurity on the internet, Durumeric has mobilized some team to revamp and develop ZMap’s performance.
According to Brad Brooks, the CEO of Censys, their belief remains unchanged as stated during an email interview at TechCrunch. Perfect visibility of any element that has a link with exposure to the internet is the only way through which vulnerable people and organisations can be protected against external threats.
Thus, Censys has now a variety of mechanisms for tracking the hosts, as well as their respective security states or statuses. The customers enjoy database of vulnerabilities “enhanced by context”, as well as an environment for watching and assessing their openness-oriented assets (for example, servers and office computers).
According to Brooks, most users have been leveraging the platform as a threat hunter tool where they hunt for and investigate potential security compromises, while also integrating the asset monitoring technology from Censys. Others use Censys to assess how effective their security measures have been so far in terms of length and intensity of risk.
According to Brooks, “Censys utilizes leading internet intelligence to provide leaders and their teams with the data they need to stay ahead of sophisticated cyber-attacks.” They may also employ the benchmark of Census which are used in assessing a company performance over a period and creating industry standards.
In recent times, Censys got into the generative AI wagon and created a chatbot that allows people to search their security databases using natural languages. For instance, they may query the platform by putting forth requests such as “show me all Australian locations with both FTP and HTTP”. For instance, they can use the chatbot to translate search syntax generated from a third party threat hunting platform such as Shodan and/or Zoomeye into search language for Censys can understand.
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Censys is a firm that claims to have 350,000 subscribers in its free service and above one hundred eighty (180) clients, including the FED and the department of homeland security, among others. This firm intends to use its As of now, it should be noted that by the end of 2023, Censys from Ann Arbor, MI should hire a hundred and fifty employees.
According to Brooks, the demand for cybersecurity is still high even with economic uncertainty. In fact, there were positive winds due to major enterprises moving to cloud based solutions and relocating thousands of employees to working remotely that drove up demand and queries.
It is not easy for Censys to sustain speed and maneuver over fierce headwinds.
The remaining months of 2016 are threatened with a stagnant venture funding or perhaps even a decline due to issues in the Europe and the relation between US and China. The higher interest rates are reducing opportunities for new investment which then impacts startups ability to obtain money.
Hedge funds, late stage and crossovers – investors into publicly traded and privately held corporations – have retreated from the market due to anticipated recession – in general, technology sector.
However, on another note, there are grounds for hope.
As noted in a recent Spiceworks report, although most businesses fear a recession in 2024, it does not mean that two-third (about 66%) of them do not plan to increase the annual budget and include allocations for cyber security in 202 Accordingly, according to IDC there will be cyber security spending of over $219 billion around the globe for this year, rising up to almost $300 billion by 2026 (IDC, 2020).
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