Cyclops Emerges from Stealth with $6.4M in Funding to Offer a Contextual Cybersecurity Search Platform

Generative-AI powered platform built on mesh architecture accelerates security teams' ability to make risk-based decisions by 80%

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyclops, a contextual cybersecurity search platform, today announced its emergence from stealth with $6.4M in seed funding. The funding round was led by Merlin Ventures, Magnolia Capital LLC (a subsidiary of Insight Partners), Tal Ventures and toDay Ventures, with participation from CrowdStrike's strategic investment vehicle, CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. Celebrated cybersecurity veterans Mike Fey, CEO of Island.io; Dan Amiga, CTO of Island.io; Ofer Smadari, CEO of Torq; and Eyal Gruner, CEO of Cynet, also participated in the round. 

Founded by cybersecurity veterans Eran Zilberman (CEO), Elay Gueta (CTO) and Biran Franco (CPO), Cyclops offers an intuitive, user-friendly search engine powered by generative AI to answer critical and timely questions about the state of an organization's security posture, without the need for forensics or SIEM expertise.

"Today, organizations struggle to find answers to the most complex questions across the tools in their security stack, and get simple answers on business impact," said Eran Zilberman, Cyclops CEO. "With Cyclops, these days are over. Our main purpose is to empower security teams to proactively defend against cyber threats and prioritize addressing critical vulnerabilities with the necessary contextual data. The platform generates simple and clear responses just like Google Search or ChatGPT, providing relevant security information to help security teams make better, faster decisions."

For over a decade, the industry has seen organizations struggling to understand and manage security data, both on premises and cloud-based, across dozens of disparate and overlapping security tools – stifling productivity, visibility and the ability to prioritize security decisions and actions that matter most.

"One of the primary challenges faced by cybersecurity managers is staying abreast of the changes occurring in their work environment on a daily basis," said Shay Michel, Managing Partner, Merlin Ventures. "With the introduction of a new security search engine, they can now obtain clear answers and receive valuable recommendations. This technology has emerged as a top priority for most CISOs today, and we are proud of our investment in a company that we firmly believe will spearhead the market in this domain. Moreover, as a cyber fund, we actively seek out companies that disrupt existing categories, and Cyclops is poised to revolutionize how we approach and combat cyber-attacks."

The Cyclops platform is built on a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA), and powered by generative AI to create an intuitive, user-friendly experience. Security teams can quickly and easily query Cyclops through a natural language search bar to gain meaningful insights about their environment and address vulnerabilities, security incidents and governance, risk and compliance scenarios. Cyclops enables security teams to get the most value out of their existing technology stack, improve mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR) by 80%, and help CISOs more effectively manage their cybersecurity strategy.

"Drawing inspiration from Google's groundbreaking revolution in contextual search over two decades ago, the Cyclops team is poised to make a similar seismic impact in the cybersecurity realm," remarked Mike Fey, investor and CEO of Island.io. "In a landscape plagued by alert fatigue and an ever-expanding array of security tools, Cyclops serves as the all-seeing eye, providing security teams with a unified and intuitive solution to tackle their most intricate questions. By harnessing the power of generative AI-driven search, Cyclops paves the way for a new era of data consumption and analysis, empowering security teams to navigate complexities with unprecedented efficiency and foresight."

Cyclops' founders have decades of experience building and delivering high-end cybersecurity products in the domains of SIEM, asset management and XDR, with particular expertise in product development, security strategy and sales. Cyclops CEO Eran Zilberman's extensive career has included roles such as regional sales director of RSA and general manager of the cyber security division at We Ankor. Elay Gueta, CTO of Cyclops, most recently served in the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel as an R&D group leader, served in the Israel Defense Forces as a security researcher and software developer, and led security research efforts at Cynet Security and Cellebrite. Cyclops CPO Biran Franco previously led product development and management at Axonius, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and SentinelOne, and also served as Company Commanding Officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

"To combat ever-increasing modern, sophisticated cyber attacks, organizations have turned to numerous discrete tools, inadvertently creating one of the most prominent security challenges – security silos," said Gur Talpaz, vice president corporate development and ventures at CrowdStrike. "We're excited to support Cyclops through CrowdStrike's Falcon Fund because of its innovative approach to enhancing organizational security. Cyclops' platform enables collaboration across tools and controls, eliminating silos, and drastically reducing individual security incidents."

The funding will help scale the company to meet demands from its growing customer base, hire more developers to continue product innovation and expand capabilities, and fuel its go-to-market strategy. Cyclops is generally available now and already serves existing customers in the fintech, insurance, hi-tech, and manufacturing verticals by significantly improving their efficiency around risk validation, vulnerability prioritization, posture management and compliance monitoring.

For more information on how to reap the most value from your security data, contact [email protected] or visit www.cyclops.security. 

About Cyclops
Cyclops is the first Contextual Search Platform for cybersecurity. Powered by the cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) approach and Generative AI, Cyclops allows security practitioners and security teams, on any level, to ask any question about their security data in natural language - and receive accurate, actionable answers. For more information, visit www.cyclops.security.

About Merlin Ventures
Merlin Ventures is the strategic investment arm of Merlin Group, a company with more than 25 years of success bringing technologies to the U.S. Government market. Merlin Ventures rapidly scales visionary companies and introduces disruptive solutions designed to help enterprises address today's most critical cybersecurity challenges. Its unique business model combines robust infrastructure and capital, technical cybers advisory and engineering, market readiness acceleration, and deep-rooted customer and market relationships to enable its portfolio to accelerate growth and flourish. Learn more at merlin.vc.

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