Senseon raises $6.4M to tackle cybersecurity threats with an AI ‘triangulation’ approach

Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new U.K. startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level.

Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls “AI triangulation” — simultaneously applying artificial intelligence algorithms to oversee, monitor and defend an organization’s network appliances, endpoints and “investigator bots” covering multiple microservices — has raised $6.4 million in seed funding.

David Atkinson — the startup’s CEO and founder who had previously been the commercial director for Darktrace and before that helped pioneer new cybersecurity techniques as an operative at the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense — said that Senseon will use the funding to continue to expand its business both in Europe and the U.S. 

The deal was co-led by MMC Ventures and Mark Weatherford, who is chief cybersecurity strategist at vArmour (which itself raised money in recent weeks) and previously Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Others in the round included Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane Venture Partners and CyLon, a security startup incubator in London.

As Atkinson describes it, triangulation was an analytics concept first introduced by the CIA in the U.S., a method of bringing together multiple vectors of information to unearth inconsistencies in a data set (you can read more on triangulation in this CIA publication). He saw an opportunity to build a platform that took the same kind of approach to enterprise security.

There are a number of companies that are using AI-based techniques to help defend against breaches — in addition to Darktrace, there is Hexadite (a remediation specialist acquired by Microsoft), Amazon is working in the field and many others. In fact I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any IT security company today that doesn’t claim to or actually use AI in its approach.

Atkinson claims, however, that many AI-based solutions — and many other IT security products — take siloed, single-point approaches to defending a network. That is to say, you have network appliance security products, endpoint security, perhaps security for individual microservices and so on.

But while many of these work well, you don’t always get those different services speaking to each other. And that doesn’t reflect the shape that the most sophisticated security breaches are taking today.

As cybersecurity breaches and identified vulnerabilities continue to grow in frequency and scope — with hundreds of millions of individuals’ and organizations’ data potentially exposed in the process, systems disabled, and more — we’re seeing an increasing amount of sophistication on the part of the attackers.

Yes, those malicious actors employ artificial intelligence. But — as described in this 2019 paper on the state of cybersecurity from Symantec — they are also taking advantage of bigger “surface areas” with growing networks of connected objects all up for grabs; and they are tackling new frontiers like infiltrating data in transport and cloud-based systems. (In terms of examples of new frontiers, mobile networks, biometric data, gaming networks, public clouds and new card-skimming techniques are some of the specific areas that Experian calls out.)

Senseon’s antidote has been to build a new platform that “emulates how analysts think,” said Atkinson. Looking at an enterprise’s network appliance, an endpoint and microservices in the cloud, the Senseon platform “has an autonomous conversation” using the source data, before it presents a conclusion, threat, warning or even breach alert to the organization’s security team.

“We have an ability to take observations and compare that to hypothetical scenarios. When we tell you something, it has a rich context,” he said. Single-point alternatives essentially can create “blind spots that hackers manoeuvre around. Relying on single-source intelligence is like tying one hand behind your back.”

After Senseon compiles its data, it sends out alerts to security teams in a remediation service. Interestingly, while the platform’s aim is to identify malicious activity in a network, another consequence of what it’s doing is to help organizations identify “false positives” that are not actually threats, to cut down on time and money that get wasted on investigating those.

“Organisations of all sizes need to get better at keeping pace with emerging threats, but more importantly, identifying the attacks that require intervention,” said Mina Samaan of MMC Ventures in a statement. “Senseon’s technology directly addresses this challenge by using reinforcement learning AI techniques to help over-burdened security teams better understand anomalous behaviour through a single holistic platform.”

Although Senseon is only announcing seed funding today, the company has actually been around since 2017 and already has customers, primarily in the finance and legal industries (it would only give out one customer reference, the law firm of Harbottle & Lewis).