MixMode Raises $4 Million in Series A Round Led by Entrada Ventures

• Published Month : Wednesday, 08 Apr 2020 10:00 am

Investment to Accelerate AI-driven Platform for Cybersecurity Teams

MixMode, Inc., an AI-driven cybersecurity intelligence platform, announced it has closed a $4 million Series A round of funding led by Entrada Ventures. The round included participation from existing investors including Keshif Ventures and Blu Venture Investors. The new funding will be used to expand MixMode's AI-powered network traffic analytics platform and to fuel the growth of its worldwide network of customers and partners.

"Large enterprise security teams urgently need a solution to identify zero-day threats," said John Keister, CEO at MixMode. "Our predictive analytics platform is solving this massive problem for clients today. We are excited to continue our growth path and we are fortunate to be working with an experienced partner like Entrada on our journey."

According to a report by the Ponemon Institute, over 75% of successful cybersecurity attacks on organization endpoints are due to zero-day attacks.  By definition, these emergent attacks cannot be identified by threat intelligence feeds (that focus on lists of historical threats) that most security platforms rely upon. MixMode's AI is built to baseline a network in seven days and surface zero-day, non-fingerprinted attacks in real-time.

MixMode's cybersecurity platform is designed to be a single pane of glass for security analysts. The MixMode platform brings in multiple streams of data including network data, public cloud data and feeds from existing security tools such as endpoint, firewall, and SIEM. The MixMode Network Traffic Analytics platform is the first cybersecurity platform to leverage "Third Wave" AI (as defined by DARPA), utilizing an advanced unsupervised learning model to address major security issues facing cybersecurity teams today.  The platform's ability to leverage AI to build a network baseline and to predict the network's future activity make it uniquely powerful in identifying emerging threats.

MixMode's CTO and chief scientist, Dr. Igor Mezic, created MixMode's patented technology based on 20 years of experience developing advanced AI technology that has been used for projects with DARPA, the Air Force, Army, CDC, and many others. Unlike AI used in other cybersecurity solutions, MixMode's Unsupervised AI acts autonomously, requiring no human training or tuning. MixMode creates a network baseline and delivers zero-day detections within just seven days versus typical ML/AI systems that take anywhere from 6-24 months to train in data, configure and tune. MixMode also constantly refreshes that baseline without manual intervention so it's always current and relevant. MixMode is a quantum leap forward for companies that want to leverage AI to improve their security programs and it can be implemented up to 100x faster than other systems.

"We believe MixMode's team is uniquely positioned to deliver AI-based solutions to the cybersecurity market," said Eric Kanowsky, general partner at Entrada. "With world-class, patented AI technology and a growing footprint of customers, we believe MixMode has tremendous potential."

The platform uses MixMode's patented context-aware AI to reduce the number of false-positive alerts and automate the threat identification process through intelligent correlation. MixMode recognizes point-in-time events, correlates those events across environments and filters the alerts based on impact to the organization.

"MixMode is more than a generation ahead of the adversary. To our knowledge, MixMode is the only Third Wave AI network security monitoring tool currently available," said Peter R. Stephenson, Ph.D., an AI researcher at the University of Leicester.

In addition to Keister, and Mezic, MixMode is led by Bryan Elliot, VP of Engineering. Mezic was a founder at other AI-based startups in addition to his work on AI projects for DARPA and the DOD. Previously, Elliot was co-founder and CTO at Ping Identity and an engineering leader at Citrix and LogMeIn.