Cyble, which pegs itself as Google for the dark web, raised US$24 million (AU$36 million) in its Series B funding round in early August.
The cyber security company, started by Beenu Arora and Manish Chachada in 2019, tapped former investors Blackbird Venutres and new investors King River Capital, with participation from Spider Capital, January Capital and Summit Peak Ventures.
Cyble, which was featured in Forbes Australia earlier this year, began by scraping the dark web to provide an early warning system to its clients that attackers were considering a hit. But as organisations went through digital transformations, Cyble found their clients’ systems had weak spots. Today, it not only notifies its clients of potential hits (within 2 minutes), but it also claims it can tell them where the exposures in their systems are and provide recommendations on how to fix them. The company claims it has 90% coverage of cybercrime activities, with visibility into over 6,000 Darknet marketplaces. Its goal is to reach 50,000 marketplaces.
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By 2021, the business had raised around US$14 million in funding (US$4 million seed, US$10 million Series A). Its Series B round brings the company’s total funding to US$38 million. Arora, Arora, Cyble’s CEO and co-founder, says the company plans to use the cash to significantly ramp up its product investments and global marketing efforts.
It also comes amid an increase in global cyber security concerns, the company’s chief operating officer and co-founder, Chahada says.
“Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a surge in global cyber warfare has underscored the crucial need for companies to heighten their security measures and monitor dark web activities. Threat Intelligence has never been more important.”
The rise of artificial intelligence is also a concern, Arora says. “Several threat actors are leveraging AI, which is touted as the future of cybercrime.”
Speaking to Forbes Australia earlier this year, Cyble investor and General Partner at Blackbird Ventures, Tom Humphrey, said the cyber security sector had been strong during the tech downturn.
“Cyber is increasingly resilient as a market, and the industry has held up well during the broader market pullback. Security infrastructure is “mission-critical” to the enterprise with C-Suite and Board-level exposure; it’s not a discretionary expense,” he says.
“The trends in cyber we are focused on at Blackbird are the shortage of cyber talent, technology developments expanding the need for new footprint coverage (such as mobile, IoT, cloud security, API security, etc.), the opportunity for AI in the identification of threats and reducing signal-to-noise in alerts, new methods of data encryption and security, and embedding security practices into the organisation to heighten prevention as opposed to detection and response.”
Revenue in the cyber security market is projected to reach US$162 billion in 2023, according to estimates from Statista. At the same time, the cost of cyber crime has been estimated to hit $8 trillion this year and $10.5 trillion by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures’ 2022 Official Cybercrime Report.
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