Dropzone AI, an autonomous alert investigation platform for security operations teams, announced that it has closed on $3.5 million in seed funding, led by Decibel Partners, joined by Pioneer Square Ventures Fund. Notable angel investors such as Oliver Friedrichs, CEO of Pangea Security and founder and former CEO of Phantom Cyber, Jon Oberheide co-founder and former CTO of Duo Security, and Jesse Rothstein, co-founder and CTO of ExtraHop, also participated in the round.
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“Ninety-nine percent of the security world struggles to sort through the number of security alerts they get”
Additionally, Dropzone announced the availability of its pre-trained autonomous AI security agent, built from the ground up using the latest LLMs, that works alongside human analysts on security operations teams to handle the overwhelming work of investigating the mountain of alerts they get every day from security systems. Dropzone mimics the thought process and techniques of expert security analysts to thoroughly and autonomously investigate all alerts, so human analysts can focus on higher-value security work.
“Hackers and defenders have been in a technological arms race for years,” said Edward Wu, founder and CEO of Dropzone AI. “Every new advancement from scripts, to machine learning and now AI, has allowed hackers to weaponize their attacks at greater efficacy, speed and scale, multiplying the pressure on security teams. Companies must confront the new reality that we’ve reached an inflection point where humans alone can’t keep up anymore. They need to be armed with an entirely new and better way to automate and enable their defensive forces.”
Analysts have estimated that cyber attacks will cost an estimated $10.5 trillion in damage annually by 2025, but security operations teams are understaffed, overburdened and lack the resources necessary to fully defend against attacks. In addition, the acceleration of digitalization means security teams need to respond to thousands of alerts every day from EDR, firewall, IDS, email, and cloud security solutions. Most teams are only able to fully research about 10 percent of daily events, leaving open the likely possibility of missing early warning signs of serious security breaches.
Dropzone AI’s autonomous alert investigation agent automates the time-consuming, repetitive work of investigating alerts, and can be used for everything from continuous, automated end-to-end analysis to ad-hoc deep dives. Dropzone gives teams an instant, AI security force that:
- Integrates with existing security systems and data
- Fully analyzes and prioritizes every alert using both security systems and data sources, including phishing, exploitation, endpoint and cloud alerts, among others
- Produces detailed investigation reports
- Lets teams investigate even deeper through its expert chatbot assistant
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“Ninety-nine percent of the security world struggles to sort through the number of security alerts they get,” said Jerry Perullo, longtime CISO of Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of NYSE, and Chairman of the FS-ISAC (Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center) an industry consortium dedicated to reducing cyber-risk in the global financial system. “Too many legitimate alerts are never touched, while false positives consume valuable human time. With AI, not only can analysis occur more quickly and consistently, but all the enrichment and investigation avenues can be explored every time. That’s a game-changer.”
Dropzone is founded by Edward Wu, one of the leading experts in applied AI/ML in the cybersecurity field. While at ExtraHop Networks, Wu oversaw end-to-end development of AI / ML and detection capabilities from scratch and led the company’s successful product transition from network performance management to network threat detection and response. ExtraHop today is widely known for best-of-breed machine learning in the field of cybersecurity and is able to detect malicious activity on some of the largest and most complex networks in the world.
“Cybersecurity teams need to update their defensive scheme with the best technology available, and Dropzone is an essential tool for every company that wants to rapidly augment its security operations team to face the increasing cyber threats of today’s world,” said Jon Sakoda, founder of Decibel Partners. “We are incredibly privileged to partner with Edward and to help him deliver on his vision of using AI to deploy autonomous reinforcements – this changes the game for cybersecurity teams and brings much-needed help to the front lines.”
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