LTE and 5G network security firm OneLayer has announced a $6.5 million equity investment from Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), the VC arm of Koch Industries. At the same time, Koch Industries will be implementing OneLayer solutions at the site of one of its manufacturing subsidiaries.
The investment brings the total funds raised by OneLayer to $14.5 million. The money will be used to aid expansion into a growing number of vertical sectors, to strengthen OneLayer’s cyber lab capabilities, and to fuel its global reach.
Private network 5G is considered the right and essential solution for communication with the growing number of autonomous vehicles operating on factory floors. It provides lower latency and higher traffic throughput for devices that require their own machine learning capabilities to navigate their environment and perform their tasks.
“IoT and OT networks are transforming,” commented Eli Groner, MD at KDT. “Companies committed to modernizing their operations, maximizing efficiency, and limiting latency will be installing private cellular networks to gain the benefits that 5G networks provide.”
While the early stages of the Industry 4 revolution could be typified by embedded IoT sensors delivering data to help manage and control the manufacturing process, we are now seeing the introduction of more advanced, self-contained and often mobile robot devices that can act independently within a manufacturer, in hospitals, around utilities and in many other vertical sectors.
But new networks introduce new technologies with additional threat vectors. The primary problem is that existing IT security tools are not applicable to private 5G networks, and a new approach is required. Without this new approach, visibility and adequate cellular network segmentation is often inadequate.
“The challenge for private 5G is that existing solutions are tailored for IT networks and are mostly not applicable to a cellular network,” Dave Mor, co-founder and CEO at OneLayer, told SecurityWeek. “So, if you have a private 5G network, you also have several gaps — and that’s what OneLayer seeks to provide: visibility, policies, detection, zero trust and more.”
“We want to enable the benefits of cellular networks while maintaining visibility and segmentation policies in a zero-trust model,” added Matthew Stucky, enterprise security architect at Koch Industries.
Tel Aviv, Israel-based OneLayer emerged from stealth in March 2022 with $8.2 million seed funding. The company was founded in September 2021 by Dave Mor, a former member of the Israeli Military Intelligence.
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