Axonius, an Israeli startup that’s working to secure businesses in the age of the Internet of Things, has announced $4 million in seed funding.
The startup’s software is designed to help businesses address a pair of important questions. How many devices are on their corporate network? And, more importantly, are they all secure?
To answer these questions, Axonius has developed a platform to monitor and manage the security of every connected device on a company’s network, with the goal of protecting them from hackers.
Enterprises can unknowingly put themselves at risk when they introduce new tech, like IoT products, into their corporate networks. As a case in point, an internet-connected fish tank at a North American casino was discovered to have been hijacked and used as a launching point to steal data from the casino, security firm Darktrace said back in July.
Security researchers have all been warning that similar attacks will continue to occur, given that smart device adoption is set to soar.
For businesses, the danger is that they’ll have thousands of unmanaged devices running on their network, creating a huge blind spot for a possible attack, Axonius said. It doesn’t help that many of these IoT products are designed without enough consideration given to security.
The startup’s technology is built to address the problem by giving a company’s IT staff one central platform from which to manage the different devices.
Any kind of machine, from Windows laptops to Linux servers, smartphones, and new IoT products, can work over the platform, said Dean Sysman, CEO of the startup and a former Israeli intelligence officer. The technology does so without the need to install software on each individual device, he said in an email. Instead, it relies on software interfaces, like APIs already built into each machine, to communicate with the devices. The Axonius platform is also designed to work with the software tools a business may already have in place to control their IT assets.
Backing Axonius is YL Ventures, which led the $4 million seed funding round, along with Vertex Ventures and Emerge Capital.
Axonius competes with other security vendors, like Tanium and ForeScout, which are also helping businesses remotely manage all their machines over a corporate network.
The startup is currently offering its Axonius Platform in limited availability but will open it to general release early next year.