Dive Brief:

• Estonia-based cybersecurity startup Binalyze announced Tuesday that it raised $19 million in a Series A round of funding led by Molten Ventures, with participation from Cisco Investments, Citi Ventures and Deutsche Bank Corporate Venture Capital.

• Binalyze specializes in digital forensics and incident response, a field within cybersecurity that focuses on the identification, investigation and remediation of cyberattacks. The funding, in part, allows the company to launch the latest version of its DFIR platform, AIR 4.0, according to a press release.

• "We are thrilled to have secured this substantial investment from such prestigious partners; the participation of Cisco, with its portfolio of cybersecurity solutions, along with the venture arms of Citi and Deutsche Bank, two global banking heavyweights, further underscores the credibility of our technology and team,” Binalyze CEO Emre Tinaztepe said in the release.

Dive Insight:

The global average cost of a data breach between March 2022 and March 2023 was $4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years and an all-time high, according to a report published by IBM in July. Detection and escalation costs jumped 42% over this same time frame, representing the highest portion of breach costs, and indicating a shift towards more complex breach probes, the research found.

"Time is the new currency in cybersecurity both for the defenders and the attackers,” Chris McCurdy, general manager at Worldwide IBM Security Services, said in a press release at the time.

Fifty-one percent of organizations are planning to increase security investments as a result of a breach, including in the areas of incident response planning and testing; employee training; and threat detection and response, the report said.

Binalyze plans to launch AIR 4.0 in October with a new “Investigation Hub” designed to allow security analysts and incident responders to investigate across hundreds of devices from a single dashboard, with the goal of increasing speed, visibility and efficiency, according to the Tuesday release.

“With cyberattacks growing in sophistication and frequency, there is a critical need for efficient investigation solutions to reduce the average investigation time to just hours and put Security Operations Center (SOC) teams back on the offensive,” Binalyze said. Investigations currently take 26.1 days on average, the company said, citing market research firm IDC.

Founded in 2018 by Tinaztepe, Binalyze has raised a total of $30.5 million to date, spokesperson Matthew Edwards told CFO Dive. The company has regional offices in the U.K. and U.S. as well as smaller operations in developing markets like Singapore, he said.

Binalyze plans to use this next phase of its growth to strengthen its market outreach team; further its R&D efforts by integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning into its incident response processes; and amplify its worldwide customer support, the release said.