The newest startup in the cybersecurity industry has stepped out of the shadows promising a bold new way of tackling cybercrime and backed by extensive funding.
Redacted (styled as [redacted] with the brackets) seeks to apply threat intelligence before engaging hackers proactively so as to “recover data loss and disrupt their activities,” as Ingrid Lunden of Techcrunch put it.
As part of Redacted’s public launch, the startup also announced it had $35 million in funding for the business’ immediate expansion.
Ten Eleven Ventures will be leading the Series B funding and it will be joined by Valor Equity Partners and SVB Capital. As a venture capital company, Ten Eleven Ventures has made funding cyber security businesses its specialty, having provided similar backing for other such cybersecurity startups. Though perhaps none quite as bold as Redacted.
In addition to $25 million in prior funding, this will bring the total funding for Redacted up to an impressive $60 million.
As Lunden points out, for a startup that has effectively been a total surprise for the wider industry to have such funding can largely be ascribed to the composition of its team. One-half of the founding team and the leadership of Redacted is made up by Max Kelly.
In the past, Max Kelly has held various roles within the National Security Agency as well as U.S. Cyber Command. After those roles, he worked as Facebook’s chief security officer. The startup’s other founder is John Hering who founded and was for a time the CEO of Lookout another cybersecurity firm.
In addition to the founders, the startup promotes that the rest of the company’s team together carries “more than 300 years of combined experience” in the field of cyberdefense. Redacted’s personnel have experience from working at Cisco, Amazon, Facebook, JPL, U.S. Marine Corps, Symantec, NASA, CIA, FBI, U.S. Cyber Command, NSA, Air Force, DIA, Navy, as well as GCHQ in the UK.
According to Kelly, “A big focus of the industry in the last 10 years was preventing the breach. But that was always a lie. There is nothing you can do to prevent a breach. The point is not to prevent the breach but the damage from it. Make sure people can’t get data out, and if they do, make sure you can get it back.”
Thus the focus of Redacted is not the technology bad actors use but the bad actors themselves. Using tools Redacted has developed from technology both in-house and from others, the startup will seek out the patterns cybercriminals leave in their wake then like a bloodhound on the trail they will sniff them out.
Upon which Redacted will reach out to law enforcement if the cybercriminals are somewhere the law can reach them.
While Redacted has not shared or announced its customers it has worked with the cyber startup Cado which has provided Redacted with cyber forensic tools.
