Cybersecurity startup Deep Instinct raises $43 million in funding round

Deep Instinct, an Israeli cybersecurity company that uses machine learning to predict, identify, and prevent cyberattacks, said it has raised $43 million in a Series C funding round.

The round was led by the Millennium New Horizons fund, with participation from Unbound, a London-based investment firm founded by businessman Shravin Mittal, along with LG, and existing investor Nvidia, Corp. the startup said in a statement.

The latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $100 million, the company said. HP Inc. and Samsung are tech giants that have participated in previous financing rounds.

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The funds raised will be used to speed up sales and marketing, as well as to support the expansion of business operations globally, the statement said.

The Tel Aviv-based startup is one of the first to use deep learning algorithms to predict cyber-threats and advanced attacks. Deep learning is inspired by the brain’s ability to learn. Once a brain learns to identify an object, its identification becomes second nature. Similarly, Deep Instinct’s Artificial Neural Network technology mimics the brain to recognize in real time any type of cybersecurity threat, such as malware, malicious code ransomware and APT attacks, and prevent it, according to the firm.

Guy Caspi, the co-founder of cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct (Courtesy)

“Traditional cybersecurity is broken,” said Guy Caspi, co-founder and CEO of Deep Instinct, in the statement. “Current solutions based on ‘assume breach’ are simply insufficient for the highly sophisticated attack landscape we all face. Deep Instinct takes an entirely new approach, preventing attacks before they are executed.”

Deep Instinct’s Fortune 500 customer list includes global financial services and healthcare, aviation, insurance, and technology companies, the statement said.

“This significant round of new funding highlights the importance of prevention for every enterprise. The economic impact of repairing a breach is too high to ignore the need to prevent threats before they occur. The message to the market is that to fight today’s cyber threats true prevention will become more critical than detection and response.” said Lane Bess, Deep Instinct’s chairman.

The company has grown rapidly since its founding, and has seen an over 400% increase in annual revenue and a 300% increase in its customer base in 2019, the statement said.

“There is no shortage of cybersecurity software providers, yet no company aside from Deep Instinct has figured out how to apply deep learning to automate malware analysis,” said Ray Cheng, partner at Millennium New Horizons. The startup has a “proven ability to use its proprietary neural network to effectively detect viruses and malware no other software can catch. That genuine protection in an age of escalating threats, without the need of exorbitantly expensive or complicated systems is a paradigm change.”

Deep Instinct last year announced a partnership with HP Inc. to launch the software on some of HP’s latest devices.

“Artificial intelligence is now sweeping across industries, bringing benefits to a wide range of vertical markets,” said Jeff Herbst, vice president of Business Development at Nvidia. “Deep Instinct’s unique approach in applying true deep learning to cybersecurity is yielding revolutionary breakthroughs that are being embraced by a growing market.”