BiennialsA London-based startup building a toolkit for digital forensics and incident response announced this week that it has raised $19 million in a Series A round led by Molten Ventures with participation from Cisco Investments, Citibank Ventures and Deutsche Bank Ventures.
The tranche, which brings Binalyze’s total raise to $30.5 million, says founder and CEO Emre Tinaztepe. It will be directed, in his words, to “respond to market conditions effectively” and “continue to expand rapidly.”
“The mission was — and continues to be — to disrupt and innovate the digital forensics industry to make forensics accessible for a wide range of use cases,” Tinaztepe told TechCrunch in an email interview. “To achieve this democratization of digital forensics, it was necessary to make it extremely fast, remote, scalable, automated, and integrated with other security platforms.”
Binalyze’s fundraising comes at a difficult time for cybersecurity startups, at least in terms of raw capital flowing through the sector. Internet startups saw about $2.7 billion in venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2023, up from $2.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022. But that was down 58% from the $6.5 billion these startups received in the quarter. 1st of 2022. According to To Crunchbase.
Binalyze, which Tinaztepe launched after stints at antivirus companies Comodo and Zemana, achieved early success by securing military and government contracts in “multiple regions” around the world; Tinaztepe did not say where exactly. Binalyze also has an undisclosed number of enterprise clients, and a team of 80 people currently, which Tinaztepe expects to grow to about 110 by the end of the year.
So, what does Binalyze do? Tinaztepe ran me through the high-level features.
Binalyze first collects different types of digital forensics – for example, evidence of a data breach – in evidence across clouds, network assets, and devices including laptops and desktops. Once evidence is collected, Binalyze moves it to screening tools that can aid treatment by automatically analyzing the data.
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Image credits: Biennials
Binalyze is certainly not the only platform doing this. Recently, Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire Magnet Forensics, a digital forensics company that offers similar software to investigate cybersecurity threats. There’s also Cado Security, whose cloud-based digital forensics platform helps security teams perform forensic work.
But Tinaztepe stresses that Benalize differs from existing solutions because it focuses on investigation and cooperation rather than blocking and monitoring. “It also stands out from legacy forensics solutions because it is completely browser-based, fast, remote, collaborative and automated,” he added.
To what extent this is the case is up for debate. But there is definitely strong demand for the types of products Binalyze is building. Mordor intelligence Projects The digital forensics tools market will grow to $10.82 billion by 2028, up from $5.89 billion in 2023.
“We clearly see an emerging market and requirement for modern digital forensics In response to the institution Cyber resilience strategies and the “assume breach” mindset. “This category is currently served by very few incumbents and Binalyze considers itself a leader in this field,” Tinaztepe said. “Binalyze delivers powerful investigation capability – through automation, integration and collaboration – which reduces investigation time and therefore associated costs and risks.”