Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More
Panorays, a provider of security risk management software, today announced that it closed a $42 million series B funding round led by Greenfield Partners with participation from Aleph and Oak HC/FT, as well as new investors BlueRed Partners, Greenspring Associates, and Moneta VC. The company says that it plans to spend the capital on product R&D and hiring as it looks to expand the size of its platform.
Investments in cyber risk mitigation technologies continue to grow as cyberattacks proliferate during the pandemic. In 2020, the average business cost of a cyberattack was $3.86 million, and it took over 200 days to detect the breach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gartner projects that worldwide spending on information security and risk management technology and services is forecast to climb 12.4% to reach $150.4 billion in 2021.
Founded in 2016 by Demi Ben-Ari, Matan Or-El, and Meir Antar, Tel Aviv, Israel-based Panorays offers monitoring and alerting systems designed to map a company’s cyber posture without requiring installation or integration with third-party systems.
“My cofounders and I met each other in the Israeli Air Force’s Intelligence Unit,” Or-El told VentureBeat via email. “While I was working with Imperva, I saw firsthand how tedious, inefficient, and ineffective managing supplier security could be — and what a huge risk it was becoming … Managing third-party security risk involves many different stakeholders within an organization, and that’s why Panorays was built as an automated, easy-to use, comprehensive platform that unites different departments within a company as well as all of their suppliers.”
Simulating cyberattacks
Cyber security assessments are a key part of making cyber defenses stronger and more effective, some research suggests. More than half of the respondents to Experian’s Seventh Annual Data Breach Preparedness Study indicate that they regularly conducted “third-party cyber security assessments” in 2019, and increase from about 9% over the past two years.
But there’s risk associated with relying on third-party suppliers for cybersecurity.
“The pandemic has illustrated the need to secure the digital supply chain, with so many employees working from home now part of that ecosystem,” Or-El said. “Much like how the rays of the sun illuminate everything they touch, Panorays was designed to bring visibility into previously unseen elements of supplier cyber risk.”
Panorays’ platform mimics thousands of hackers, performing reconnaissance to uncover a client’s attack vectors. Simultaneously, it manages vendor questionnaires that take into account internal policy, which are used to generate a rating from 0 to 100 to characterize a given vendor’s compliance.
Elsewhere, Panorays checks suppliers’ readiness regarding presence, network robustness, and app shielding. It continuously analyzes and updates data from more than 1,000 public sources as well as from Panorays’ own research, detailing any lapses it finds and providing guides with suggested fixes.
“Panorays [gives] everyone a single, unified place to communicate, collaborate and most importantly, remediate third-party security risk,” Or-El said. “We compete primarily against BitSight and SecurityScorecard, but are differentiated in that, unlike other vendors, Panorays combines automated, dynamic security questionnaires with external attack surface assessments and business context to provide organizations with a rapid, accurate view of supplier cyber risk.”
This latest funding round brings Panorays’ total raised to $62 million. The company previously raised $15 million in series A funding, announced in December 2019.
