Trackd, an early stage startup founded by former NSA engineer Mike Starr, has secured $3.35 million in seed funding to build technology to automate the remediation of software vulnerabilities.
The company said the funding was led by Flybridge with additional investments from Lerer Hippeau, SaaS Ventures, and Expa.
Based in Reston, Virginia, Trackd is working on new technology to help tackle the vexing problem of vulnerability management and remediation. The company launched a beta product on Tuesday promising to help defenders apply patches without fear of disruption.
“The dirty little secret in the vulnerability remediation community is that fear of disruption due to patching… when patching broke things frequently,” Trackd chief executive Starr said in a note announcing the financing. “Times have changed, and only a very small percentage of patches cause disruption, but that perception and fear is difficult to overcome,” he added.
Starr said Trackd’s patch management platform records the experience of all patches applied by its users, anonymizes that data, and makes it available in real-time to all other users. If a patch is disruptive, that information is made available to other vulnerability remediation teams applying the same patch, allowing them to plan accordingly.
Conversely, if a patch is applied multiple times with no evidence of disruption, the teams responsible for vulnerability management can confidently use auto-patching to speed remediation with little to no impact on resources.
The company is currently working with design partners and beta customers on a platform that uses a lightweight agent to collect metadata about the operating system and all installed applications. The data is used to drive patching decisions and pinpoint any signs of disruptions or patch quality problems.
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