Investment Notes: Cyble

We're excited to co-lead the US$4M seed funding round into cyber security startup, Cyble. We are co-leading the round with Spider Capital in the United States, with participation from Picus Capital, Cathexis Ventures, Xgoogler Ventures, and others. The funding comes as Cyble graduates from Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 (W21) cohort.

Cyble is an AI-powered cyber intelligence company that empowers organisations with dark web cybercrime monitoring and migration services. The dark web is currently estimated to have 500X the surface area of the visible/public web and this is where the vast majority of early cyber attack communication and collaboration takes place.

Eyes For The Dark Web

The vision for Cyble is to become the "Eyes for the dark web" for enterprise customers. The platform monitors the dark web and collects information on what people are talking about and their activity, applies machine learning to normalise and aggregate the information captured, then surfaces risk-adjusted “alerts” to enterprise organisations through a dashboard that leads them through an issue management workflow (with social collaboration elements for cyber response teams such as commenting, chat, etc.)

The mission is ultimately to pick up threats far earlier in the cyber attack cycle. History shows evidence of threats showing up on the dark web well before they are otherwise sighted. With this knowledge, Cyble’s customers can stay one step ahead of the hackers.

There are strong tradewinds behind Cyble’s business, including;

1. Increasing sophistication of cyber attackers
2. Growing complexity of organisation surface layers with cloud/devices (more ways to attack)
3. Growing regulatory pressure (GDPR, etc)
4. Rising costs of attacks

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, says "the only place in the business that doesn't have a budget constraint is cyber security". And this sense of urgent value is clearly seen in the short sales cycle and strong inbound demand that Cyble is seeing.

A Team On A Life's Mission

Cyble is founded by a strong team whose life mission was to build this product. Cofounders Beenu Arora and Manish Chachada met while studying for the joint MBA program at Columbia University and London Business School.

Building this product is the culmination of Beenu’s career journey to date which has tracked him from the Indian secret service and through the cyber security teams of PWC, BHP and Google. He is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. Beenu has been looking for this product throughout his career and, in not finding it, decided to build it for himself.

Manish is a seasoned finance and operations leader with 15+ years of experience in International Corporate Finance and Business Management experience, combined with a keen interest in business and technology. Manish co-chairs the special interest technology group for Financial Executive Network Group (FENG) and is also a member of the Forbes Business Council.

As a founding team, Beenu and Manish bring software and security engineering, and operations experience from large corporates.

Time To Build

Cyble is truly global from Day 1, both by customers and team. They have a strong team of 27 people across Australia, the USA, India, and Singapore and have built an impressive client base to date including a number of FORTUNE® 500 companies.

We are excited to be partnering with Cyble on the next chapter of their journey. The team has ambitious plans for 2021 and we look forward to taking that ride with them.

Learn more about Cyble in this BusinessWire feature.