Israeli Startup Empow Raises $9 Million for U.S. Expansion

Israeli startup Empow Cyber Security announced on Thursday that it has raised $9 million in a Series A funding round. $8 million has come from private investors and $1 million from the Office of the Chief Scientist at the Israel Ministry of Economy. The money will be used primarily to expand the company’s operations in North America.

Empow currently employs three staff in its Boston, Mass. office, which will be expanded, and a second office opened on the West Coast later in 2017. Both offices are sales and marketing for the U.S. market, with R&D remaining in Ramat Gan, Israel.

Empow provides a platform that unifies separate security defenses in a more efficient and effective manner than unwieldy SIEMs. It uses security abstraction to separate the security infrastructure into primary components it calls ‘security particles’. These particles are then linked together using a common language that interacts with the APIs of the different security technologies, enabling the complete security infrastructure be viewed and treated as a single entity rather than a series of individual silos.

Without that cross-technology visibility, individual alerts from different technologies can easily be missed. A possible phishing alert in isolation could be ignored by analysts. A subtle possibility of credential misuse from a different technology could also be missed.

Empow concentrates on ‘intent’. If it spots a phishing possibility in the email alerts, it knows what to look for in the network alerts; and ties the phishing and credential misuse into a threat warning for the analyst.

As new attack methodologies emerge, empow can be ‘taught’ to recognize the different indications in the different technologies of the customer’s infrastructure. empow itself is vendor-neutral, so the infrastructure itself does not need to change — empow’s purpose is to make any infrastructure more efficient. This means it can work with any existing infrastructure, whether that is on-premise or in the cloud.

While customers can develop their own ‘apps’ to detect, investigate and mitigate new attack methodologies, empow also provides an app store for emerging and common issues. These currently include cross-technology indicators for threats such as ransomware, spear-phishing, privilege escalation and financial data leaks.

Avi Chesla, co-founder and CEO, explains, “Empow creates an enterprise security posture that is as robust and nimble as the attacks it aims to prevent. Our security abstraction is creating a radical change in the realm of cybersecurity, making cyber-defenses exponentially better than the sum of their parts. It’s like a cyber general coordinating your security army: empow helps sends the right troops into battle at the right time.”