ServiceNow backs $50M round for cybersecurity startup Uptycs

Waltham, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity startup Uptycs Inc. today announced it has closed a $50 million funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Sapphire Ventures and ServiceNow Inc.’s venture capital arm.

The round brings Uptycs’ total outside funding to more than $90 million.

Uptycs’ provides what it describes as the first product in the cloud-native security analytics category that detects hacking attempts across both cloud workloads and endpoints such as employee devices. Normally, companies must use separate security tools to protect cloud workloads and endpoints. Consolidating a workflow normally spread across multiple applications into a single platform can improve administrators’ productivity by removing the need to switch back and forth among different interfaces.

When Uptycs’ platform detects a potential breach, it maps out all the systems that may have been affected. It then looks for data that may help administrators find and fix the cause of the incident. The platform compares suspicious files found on affected systems against known virus signatures, while checking if the cyberattack matches one of the known hacker tactics described in MITRE ATT&CK database. The database is an industry-standard cybersecurity resource maintained by Mitre Corp., a nonprofit that manages several federally-funded research labs. 

After Uptycs completes the analysis, it displays the findings in a visual dashboard. Incidents are ranked based on severity so administrators can prioritize investigations to focus on the most urgent issues first.

Beyond investigating threats, Uptycs provides features that it says can help companies with two other tasks: finding vulnerabilities and ensuring audit compliance. For vulnerability detection, the platform provides a monitoring tool that can detect when a change to a cloud environment causes a configuration issue with the potential to be exploited by hackers. Uptycs also checks if the environment’s configuration meets the requirements set forth by industry cybersecurity standards such as SOC 2.

Under the hood, Uptycs’ platform is built on software containers. It can run both in the cloud and on-premises.

“Data doesn’t live solely on the corporate network; productivity endpoints are mobile; production workloads are elastic and distributed across clouds,” said Uptycs Chief Executive Officer Ganesh Pai. “It’s a completely different challenge to secure these attack surfaces, and we’re innovating to deliver a comprehensive solution.”

The startup has been investing heavily to expand its feature set. Earlier this year, Uptycs released capabilities that enable companies to find configuration-related vulnerabilities and audit compliance issues in their Amazon Web Services deployments. The startup has over the past few months also released two open-source tools, called kubequery and cloudquery, for collecting diagnostics data about enterprise infrastructure.

Uptycs will use the new funding to continue expanding its feature set and grow its go-to-market operation. The investment, the startup said, follows several years of triple-digit growth, though it didn’t share specific numbers.

Image: Uptycs

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