I am very excited to welcome Hunters to the M12 portfolio today as a co-lead for their Series A round.

I have invested in several cyber companies while at M12 that were early in their startup journey, including Aqua Security and WhiteSource.

I am constantly on the lookout for talented teams aiming to solve big problems, thoughtfully leading with intelligence and expertise. Uri May and Tomer Kazaz, the co-founders of Hunters, epitomize these qualities. Hunters has one of the best cyber teams we have seen.

Hunters has built fully autonomous threat hunting capabilities that are continuously trained by ML and improved to detect cyber attacks that bypass existing security controls. By seamlessly connecting to raw organizational data, integrating telemetry across the IT stack, and infusing the data with TTP-based (tactics, techniques, and procedures) attack intelligence, the company extracts threat signals, scores them, and intelligently correlates them across every attack surface — dramatically increasing detection accuracy and improving security operations efficiency. Hunters solves a fundamental challenge in cybersecurity by revealing hidden cyber threats.

Cyber attackers are constantly inventing new TTPs to bypass organizational security defenses. While their trails remain in the organizational data, finding them in the massive clutter is almost impossible. An incredible amount of time and resources are invested to defend enterprises, but today’s approach is mainly reactive and siloed. What’s more, the bar is getting higher as attackers are more quickly adjusting, security telemetry is exploding, technology becomes more quickly obsolete, and processes remain human resource-heavy (SIEM / SOC Paradigm). To stand against these realities, defenders need to think like attackers, and they need to do it at scale. The defenders must become proactive, move much faster, and embrace every bit of data (and better manage the noise that comes along with it).

While enterprises generally would prefer to work with a limited number of cyber vendors, dozens of single point solutions are the reality for most. Security teams are challenged with complex vendor management, not to mention the limited availability of qualified security professionals. Best-of-breed standalone solutions vs. consolidated, integrated suites is an ongoing debate in the security world. Fortunately, with Hunters.AI, you don’t have to sacrifice that best-in-class performance for an integrated approach. Hunters.AI is vendor-agnostic and really shines in best-of-breed environments. The solution leverages detections and telemetry data from various existing security solutions (e.g. CrowdStrike, CarbonBlack, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, PingIdentity, Okta, zScaler, Azure, AWS, and many more) and assists the SOC or MSSP/MDR from Day One.

The Autonomous Threat Hunting product was launched early 2020 and gained traction with top-tier customers and cybersecurity players like Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and Okta.

We are excited to co-lead this round alongside USVP, and to join existing investors YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital, to accelerate Hunters’ growth with the experience and expertise of the M12 team and the resources of the broader Microsoft ecosystem.

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