Cyber-Security Company Sentinel Labs Raises $2.5M
Sentinel Labs, a startup that detects cyber-security threats in real time, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Data Collective, Granite Hill Capital Partners, Accel Partners and several other angel investors. The company also raised $20,000 in funding last March.
A graduate of Israeli startup accelerator UpWest Labs, Sentinel Labs is trying to eliminate all admin management in finding and blocking security attacks for enterprise. Instead of going through a network, the company uses software installed on every individual device as an endpoint solution. CEO Tomer Weingarten says the Sentinel Labs team is familiar with not only defending against malware, but engineering it.
“What we’ve come up with is, you have to be on the last line of defense, on the actual machine itself,” Weingarten tells me. “With our approach, we are actually able to stop the attacks … because it’s installed on the endpoint, it can also enforce. So the second it detects something, it actually kills the threat.”
Weingarten says the funding will mainly go to research and development, in the hopes of transitioning from beta to launch in the next six months. It will also be used to build the company’s initial workforce and sales force in the United States. Sentinel Labs has several beta testers, but is still working on expanding the solution to almost all desktop, server and mobile platforms. So while the company boasts a very high percentage of blocked malware threats, it still has a while to go before it’s off the ground.
Sentinel Labs is up against established anti-virus software companies such as Norton and McAfee. With threats developing beyond previous cyber-security measures, Sentinel Labs is among startups like Ionic Security that are developing new ways to address the issue. Trusteer is another security startup with a focus on serving financial institutions.
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