Cybersecurity startup Empirical Security today announced emerging from stealth mode with $12 million in seed funding for its AI-powered vulnerability management platform.
The investment round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with additional support from DNX Ventures, Sixty Degree Capital, HPA, and several angel investors.
Founded in 2024, Chicago-based Empirical is building and training both global and custom data-driven AI models to help organizations secure their environments against the exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Using an organization’s unique combination of data, systems, and technical stack, Empirical creates local AI models tailored to that business.
The company provides a dual model architecture, where global models leverage intelligence collected from internet-scale datasets to anticipate new attacks, while local models adapt that intelligence to the customer’s unique infrastructure, operations, and threat profile.
In addition to the fresh funding, Empirical announced that Kenna Security co-founder Ed Bellis is joining the company as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Empirical co-founders Michael Roytman and Jay Jacobs also served at Kenna, which was acquired by Cisco in 2021.
Jacobs and Roytman are among the creators of the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), an open source prediction system powered by Empirical that estimates the likelihood that a software vulnerability will be exploited in attacks.
“Today’s cyberattacks are custom-built using AI and your own infrastructure against you. Defending with generic, one-size-fits-all models is a start, but only custom, localized models – trained on your data and environment – can close that gap,” Roytman, who serves as Empirical CTO, said.
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