Kenna Security raises $25 million in latest funding round

Risk intelligence and vulnerability detection company Kenna Security on Tuesday announced $25 million in its Series C funding round.

Kenna bills itself as a leader in predictive cyber risk, providing a platform that identifies threats in an organization’s networks. Their product identifies which threats pose the highest risk, allowing the customer to prioritize fixes.

The company says the Kenna Security Platform uses machine learning to predict the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited, based on visibility of the vulnerability in the wild.

“Kenna Security is pioneering a predictive approach to cyber risk to move the industry beyond traditional prevent-detect-eradicate security strategies and drive adoption of a proactive model for cyber defense,” CEO Karim Toubba told CyberScoop by email. “Customers rely on Kenna to align their entire organizations (from executives, to CISOs, IT and Security staff, and developers) around risk.”

The funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, brings Kenna’s total venture capital funding to $50 million since the San Francisco company was founded in 2009. Alex Ferrara, a partner at Bessmer, will also join Kenna’s board of directors.

“[W]e believe that Kenna is best situated to maintain its lead in the emerging vulnerability prioritization market,” Ferrera said. “Kenna’s risk-based approach offers customers a wayto cut through the volumes of data and threat reports to get to actionable information.”

Bessemer has invested in other cybersecurity startups in the past that have gone to be acquired by the likes of Symantec, Google and FireEye, among others.

“Kenna sees a world where teams work in collaboration to quickly and easily measure risk, prioritize remediation, and make a substantive difference in efficacy across the global attack surface and this investment is an endorsement of what we have achieved and our vision for the future,” Toubba said in a press release.

Toubba said Kenna plans to use the new funding to “maintain our momentum by investing in sales and marketing, expanding into Europe, investing in developing a robust channel, and of course, continuing the drumbeat of innovation Kenna Security has become known for in the area of predictive cyber risk.”

The company saw its sales more than double in 2017 and the number of companies using its platform grew by more than 60 percent.