On Wednesday, it was announced that Energy Impact Partners (EIP), the $2 billion sustainable energy and industrial-focused private equity fund that invests globally across venture, growth, credit and infrastructure companies, has led a $20 million Series A to launch Noetic Cyber, a cloud-based, continuous cyber asset management and controls platform that focuses on cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. EIP joined existing seed investors Ten Eleven Ventures and Glasswing Ventures in backing the launch.
Noetic differs from conventional cybersecurity providers in that it is not agent-based (i.e., its cybersecurity assessments are not modeled on actions or decisions taken by autonomous agents). Instead, it uses graph database technology–aggregating and studying API correlations–to discover and inventory the key entities present in an organization’s environment (whether that environment is cloud-based or on-premise). Noetic then builds a dynamic map of the “cyber relationships” between the entitles, to highlight and then quickly fix cyber risk and non-compliant systems.
“Noetic is a true market disruptor, offering an innovative way to fix the cyber asset visibility problem – a growing and persistent challenge in today’s threat landscape,” said Niloofar Razi Howe, Energy Impact Partners Senior Operating Partner, in a comment on the investment.
Track record
Noetic’s three founders–Paul Ayers, Allen Rogers and Allen Hadden–were key players in the creation of the security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) market, and are bringing this experience to bear in cyber asset management: a new imperative for critical infrastructure, particularly as highlighted in this year’s ransomware attack on the U.S. Colonial Pipeline. The three have more than 85 years of collective cybersecurity experience at nine different startups, most recently at Resilient Systems, acquired by IBM.
“Through my discussions with CISOs and security leaders, I’ve repeatedly heard that they need better visibility into their constantly changing digital infrastructure, but equally they don’t want just another dashboard of issues to address,” said Noetic Cyber CEO and Co-Founder Paul Ayers. “Security needs certainty in order to automate processes, and with Noetic, we’re providing the high-fidelity source of truth that allows security teams to use automation to identify, prioritize and fix problems.”
As for Noetic’s other key backers, Ten Eleven Ventures is a Silicon Valley VC firm focused solely on digital security startups, investing at all stages of development, including via a growth equity partnership with private equity giant KKR. Since its establishment in 2015, Ten Eleven Ventures has raised close to half a billion dollars in capital and invested in 30 leading cybersecurity firms. Glasswing Ventures, meanwhile, is a Boston-based fund that invests in early-stage startups in emerging, frontier technologies
