Ukraine-founded cybersecurity startup SOC Prime has raised $11.5 million from U.S. investors to develop a marketplace selling tools and services that defend businesses against cyber threats.
The Boston-based startup will use the investment to ramp up its growth, expand globally and hire more sales specialists, according to its founder and CEO Andrii Bezverkhyi.
Bezverkhyi, 36, compares his startup to Spotify or Netflix — it sells access to a collection of cyber threat detection tools just like streaming services sell access to music or movies. Today, the company’s online library consists of nearly 100,000 algorithms, which customers can use to detect a security threat in their code.
SOC Prime was founded in 2015 by Bezverkhiy, Oleksandr Bredikhin, and Ruslan Mihalev. It now employs over 80 people working in Ukraine, Spain, Germany and the U.S. but wants to hire 50 more specialists by 2022.
Since its foundation, the startup has raised $15 million in venture capital. The company became profitable in 2017, according to Forbes.
Among the company’s investors are California-based DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners.
“Just like Netflix and Spotify changed the way that consumers access music and movies, we believe that SOC Prime will revolutionize the way that security teams access the threat detection content that is vital to defend their organizations,” said Hiro Rio Maeda, managing partner at DNX Ventures, which invested in the startup.
Bezverkhyi started to scale its cybersecurity business at a time when the world needed it most. Between 2019 and 2020, ransomware attacks rose by 62% worldwide, while losses stemming from a corporate data breach surpassed $150 million last year.
The average company in the U.S. spends 6-14% of its annual budget for technology on cybersecurity.
According to a report by tech news outlet TechTarget, the investment in cybersecurity firms reached $7.8 billion last year.
In comparison, the market of cyberthreats detection tools is expected to reach $119 billion by 2022.
SOC Prime has experience in dealing with significant cyber threats. Its algorithms helped to investigate the BlackEnergy attacks on the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 — it was the first cyberattack ever to cause a power outage in the country.
SOC Prime works with nearly 400 security specialists. The company pays them a bounty every time a client uses their code to counter a cyberthreat. Cybersecurity specialists earn on average $700 a month; the top performers earn over $20,000 annually. The payout depends on the customers’ feedback about the code.
With $11.5 million of investment, SOC Prime wants to double the bounty size and grow it by up to fivefold next year, according to the U.S. media about technology TechCrunch.
Among the company’s clients are Fortune-100 enterprises, governments and businesses like Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EY and KPMG. Over the past year, the number of clients using SOC Prime has grown by 50% — from 4,000 to 6,000.
After the 2015 cyberattack, SOC Prime partnered with the Ukrainian bank Ukrsibbank. Instead of hiring an in-house team of expensive cybersecurity experts, the bank uses access to SOC Prime’s threat detection tools. The startup helps Ukrsibbank to identify cyber threats at the earliest stages of the attack.
