Cybersecurity mergers and venture funding trends this week:. IBM consumes ReaQta to leverage AI security platform. Micro Focus and Celerit Solutions are acquired for their risk management tech. Wabbi turns away investors at the close of oversubscribed seeding. SlashNext finds new capital to scale customer acquisition. Other startups focusing on cloud-native security find interested investors.
Funding
Viakoo secures $10 million with Series A earmarked to expand executive leadership, product development, and efforts to capitalize additional markets. Viakoo focuses on the security and remediation of IoT devices and announced its launch of the Viakoo Action Platform. This investment round was spearheaded by Shasta Ventures, joining existing investors Stanley Black & Decker, PivotNorth Capital, and Blue Fog Capital.
The startup known as Oxeye surfaces from stealth mode with a $5.3 million seed round. With its cloud-native application security testing platform, Oxeye’s final product will test applications during the CI/CD process to provide its customers data on the risks and severity of the vulnerabilities found in functional code and third-party code. This initial round of funding was led by Israeli based VC fund Move VC, with i3 Equity Partners and other cybersecurity focused investors.
Risk Ledger closes seed funding at £2.1 million. This startup looks to develop a security supply chain management platform whereby connected organizations will work together to defend future cyberattacks. Risk Ledger secured this capital influx with investment from Finnish VC, Lifeline Ventures, and other investors including Seedcamp, firstminute, Capital, Episode 1, and Village Group.
Boston based and female-founded Wabbi turns away investors when it closed its oversubscribed $2 million seed round. This continuous security platform will use this fresh capital to scale its team to service its growing customer base. Primary investors include Mendoza Ventures and Cisco Investments.
Horizon3.ai announces latest funding round at $30 million. This cybersecurity startup focuses on autonomous penetration testing with an eye towards proactively seeking and fixing attack vectors before they can be exploited by criminals. SignalFire leads this investment to enable the company to fast-tract its market release strategy.
Piiano raises $9 million via seed round to secure and control Pll with data privacy engineering for the cloud. Piiano’s Vault provides a dedicated protected database for centralizing sensitive information and enables security teams to monitor privacy artifacts. The round was led by cybersecurity-focused VC YL Ventures with the participation of Jibe Ventures and founders of other cybersecurity companies such as Snyk, Armis, Wiz and Aqua.
AI phishing defense operation, SlashNext, raises $26 million through Series B funding. This new investment is earmarked to scale customer acquisition efforts and expand operations. With new investors Tom and Matt Gallo, Telia Group, and the ACTIVE Fund of the Ayala group, and participation from early investors Norwest, Wing, and Alter Ventures, the round brings SlashNext’s total funding to $43 million.
HiveWatch secures $20 million through Series A funding. HiveWatch enables security teams to bring together data from existing disparate physical security systems and provide them with an actionable view with the intent to reframe corporate safety operations from reactive to proactive programs that identify threats before they happen.
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
BlueVoyant acquires the 202 Group for an undisclosed sum to further their goal of providing federal markets supply chain risk management. With the acquisition of the 202 Group, BlueVoyant will offer government customers managed future risk operations across agency programs. BlueVoyant’s product will cover third and fourth-party vendor mapping, geo-specific industrial base reporting, foreign investment identification and vendor viability monitoring services.
Entreda announces acquisition of its longtime partner, Privva, to provides its customer bases with an offering to evaluate the cyber preparedness of vendors and suppliers. These two (2) operations have worked side-by-side to both train the person and test the IT systems, and this transaction formalizes their intertwined operations.
CrowdStrike announces intent to acquire SecureCircle, each with the intent of finding the spacebar. This merging of operations supports CrowdStrike’s intent to modernize data protection by further enabling zero trust data protection and help its customer base gain control of how its data is downloaded, used and shared via the endpoint. This all-cash transaction is set to close this 4Q 2021.
ManTech International announces agreement to buy DC-based Gryphon Technologies from AE Industrial Partners at a purchase price of $350 million. Gryphon Technologies provides digital and systems engineering capabilities for Defense Department agencies, including the Navy, Air Force, DARPA, Missile Defense Agency and others.
Smarsh announces agreement to acquire Digital Safe archiving and risk management product line from Micro Focus. At the going rate of $375 million, the deal includes Micro Focus’ digital safe product and social media governance, supervisor and e-discovery offerings and accelerates its growth strategy.
Sollensys, a cybersecurity company built on blockchain technology, has entered a merger agreement for the acquisition of Celerit Solutions, an IT services business. The merger is expected to further Sollensys’ efforts to create a safe and immutable environment to support the banking industry by accelerating their ability to integrate cybersecurity recovery efforts in that industry.
Technology giant IBM announces plan to acquire threat response operation ReaQta pursuant to undisclosed terms. ReaQta offers an endpoint security platform that leverages artificial intelligence to identify and manage threats and provides clients with advanced detection and response capabilities.
Read more cybersecurity M&A and funding updates from SecureDisruptions here.
