Halcyon, a Texas startup building an AI-powered anti-ransomware engine to help organizations ward off data-extortion attacks, has snagged $50 million in financing from prominent venture capital investors.
The company said the $50 million Series A was led by SYN Ventures, an investment firm that makes early-stage bets on cybersecurity companies. Halcyon also took on equity investments from Dell Technologies Capital and Corner Capital.
The new financing provides a runway for Halcyon to speed up development and adoption of what it is calling a “cyber resilience platform” designed to defeat ransomware and extortion campaigns, according to co-founder and chief executive Jon Miller.
Using a lightweight agent that combines prevention engines with AI models trained solely on ransomware, Halcyon is marketing a platform promising a multi-tiered approach to defeat ransomware.
The layered components include pre-execution ransomware prevention, a feature that uses AI/ML engines to detect and block any known bad executables like off-the-shelf commodity ransomware and passes unknown but suspicious executables to the additional protection layers for further analysis.
Halcyon has also fitted features to trick ransomware into aborting or revealing the attack by exploiting features hardcoded in the ransomware itself.
“We engineered Halcyon to embrace failure as a core concept of protection. Stopping ransomware requires multiple prevention and detection techniques, all trained extensively on years of actual ransomware attacks,” Miller said.
Related: SYN Ventures Closes $300M Fund for Cybersecurity Bets
Related: Rapid7 Buys Anti-Ransomware Firm Minerva Labs for $38 Million
Related: Investors Bet Big on Safe Security for Cyber Risk Management
Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
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