CultureAI, a human cybersecurity platform founded by professional hackers, announced today that it has closed a $4 million seed round to fuel rapid growth. The investment was led by Senovo, with participation from new investors, his Conviction, in addition to existing investors from Passion Capital. Angel investors Paul Forster (Indeed co-founder) and his Guntram Friede (Head of Marketing, EMEA Salesforce & MuleSoft) also participated in the round to help CultureAI disrupt the cybersecurity awareness market.
“It’s almost unheard of for professional hackers (known as penetration testers) to fail to gain access to an organisation, even if they have great security awareness training for employees,” explains James, who continues “We successfully gain access to organisations’ data and systems every time and it’s almost always as a result of human behaviour or error. As an example, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is often touted as a key cyber defence – yet we find that an average of 32% of employees accept MFA authentication requests sent by attackers, essentially opening the door for them.
The additional capital will accelerate product development and allow CultureAI to expand into new markets.
CultureAI was founded when professional hacker James Moore realized that even the best security awareness training had no effect on an attacker’s ability to compromise an organization. CultureAI is being adopted by a rapidly growing number of organizations to easily identify and prevent security incidents caused by employees.
The traditional awareness training approach simply doesn’t improve behaviours like this – hacking people is still too easy.” James believes security coaching, not training, is key – “Outside of security, when someone starts to learn a sport or a new skill and wants to improve, they get a coach. A coach observes behaviour, corrects mistakes in real-time, and gives them tailored advice whilst motivating and empowering them by providing the right equipment to perform.
“CultureAI is revolutionising human security with a data-driven approach, disrupting the $1 billion security awareness industry,” says Jon Stokes, chief technology officer. “Within minutes our platform is detecting human security incidents across the organisation and combining those events with machine-learning to automatically drive cyber security coaching programmes that are intelligently tailored to each employees’ cyber strengths, weaknesses and job role.
A coach doesn’t simply tell them to watch some generic training videos, take a multiple choice quiz and then expect them to be perfect; which is, regrettably, the common approach to security awareness today. We built CultureAI to detect human security risks and automatically use those insights to drive technical interventions and coaching – not simply ‘train’ people. It’s a very different way to managing human risk.”
As human risk events are detected, the platform creates employee security scores to allow organisations to understand their entire human risk surface for the first time. Human security event data is also pushed to clients’ existing security tools in real-time, enabling automated mitigation of human security incidents.
News Summary:
- CultureAI Launches $4M Seed Round to Assess and Reduce Threat to Human Cyber Security
- Check all news and articles from the latest Security news updates.
