Peak XV, Formerly Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, Leads Round; Former Cloudflare Chief Revenue Officer Chris Merritt Joins Board of Directors
watchTowr, the cybersecurity startup redefining External Attack Surface Management, today announced a $19 million Series A funding round led by Peak XV, formerly known as Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, with repeat participation from Prosus Ventures and Cercano Management. The company will use the funds to capture market leadership and accelerate global growth by expanding its go-to-market, research and engineering teams. The latest investment brings its total funding raised to $29 million.
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“watchTowr has an incredible team, technology and opportunity”
Over the past year, watchTowr has seen significant adoption from critical infrastructure and Fortune 500 companies looking to strengthen their security measures.
Advancements in AI are rapidly increasing the types and modality of exploits to large businesses. Human experts and cybersecurity products of the past will not be able to protect against the speed of these attacks. Built by offensive security experts, watchTowr simulates the ingenuity and persistence of attackers and enables organizations to rapidly react to emerging techniques and threats. watchTowr’s platform also builds a real-time attacker’s view of an organization, while continuously identifying and validating exploitable vulnerabilities and weaknesses before attacks occur.
watchTowr was founded by hacker-turned-entrepreneur Benjamin Harris. Benjamin has built a remarkable profile in the cybersecurity industry over 14 years after having hacked into his school network at the age of 16. Since then, he has been helping companies around the world strengthen their cybersecurity defense and processes.
“If there’s a way to compromise your organization, watchTowr will find it,” said Benjamin Harris, CEO and Founder, watchTowr. “In the last 12 months, our predictions have been realized. Attackers have become faster at weaponizing emerging vulnerabilities, more aggressive at leveraging weaknesses to compromise organizations indiscriminately, and time to exploitation in the wild is now measured in single-digit hours. We strongly believe that rapid reaction to these threats is one of the most powerful capabilities security teams can leverage.”
Backed by the company’s world-class research, the watchTowr Platform is the fastest to leverage the latest vulnerabilities, tactics and techniques used by sophisticated adversaries, enabling organizations to test their defenses. watchTowr Labs, the company’s threat and vulnerability R&D capability, has also become globally renowned. watchTowr Labs recently demonstrated compromise of entire portions of Internet infrastructure, was the first in February 2024 to analyze and reproduce vulnerabilities used by APT groups to compromise western government entities in Ivanti’s Connect Secure VPN product (CVE-2024-22024), and has consistently been the first to provide analysis for many of 2024’s most severe vulnerabilities.
In addition to funding, the company also announced the appointment of former Cloudflare President of Field Operations & Chief Revenue Officer Chris Merritt to its board of directors to help guide watchTowr’s global growth. Merritt spent over ten years at Cloudflare, helping the company scale to over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Today, he serves as an Operating Partner at Peak XV.
“watchTowr has an incredible team, technology and opportunity,” added Merritt. “They’re solving a major challenge for global organizations by enabling them to view their systems like trained adversaries, validate weaknesses and help stop breaches – at scale. watchTowr is seeing incredible interest, and we look forward to helping Ben and the rest of the team cement their future as the next market-leader in cybersecurity.”
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