HPA Invests in Empirical Security’s $12M Seed Round to Stop Attacks with Custom Cybersecurity AI Models
HPA is excited to announce its investment in Empirical Security’s $12 million Seed Round alongside Costanoa. The round also saw participation from DNX Ventures, Sixty Degree Capital, and strategic investors Jonathan Cran, founder of Intrigue (acquired by Google/Mandiant), Wade Baker, creator of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report and founder of The Cyentia Institute, and Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CTO of Qualys and CISO of Google.
This investment leverages HPA’s expertise in cybersecurity and AI to support Empirical as they scale.
Kenna Security co-founder Ed Bellis also joins Empirical Security as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), reuniting with Empirical Security’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Michael Roytman and co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Jay Jacobs.
Companies regularly use generic, global models to prioritize which of the hundreds of daily threats to pay attention to. But every company has its own unique combination of data, systems and technical stack. Empirical uses that data to build and train custom ‘local models’ that make more accurate predictions about the most critical threats.
“Today’s cyber attacks are custom-built using AI and your own infrastructure against you,” said Michael Roytman, Co-founder and CTO of Empirical Security. “Defending with generic, one-size-fits-all models is a start, but only custom, localized models – trained on your data and environment – can close that gap.”
Empirical Security’s dual model architecture allows security teams to leverage the best of both global and local models:
- Global models trained on nearly 2 million daily exploitation events mined from internet-scale datasets to detect and anticipate the latest attacks.
- Local models trained to adapt the intelligence to each customer’s unique infrastructure, operations, and threat profile.
This approach delivers precise, measurable predictions and decision support, empowering CISOs to act confidently and justify cybersecurity decisions with evidence-based risk analysis.
HPA is excited to partner again with Ed, Michael, and Jay on Empirical after backing them at Kenna Security, which sold to Cisco in 2021.
HPA Deal Lead Alex Brown will continue contributing his expertise to Empirical, leveraging his background in the cloud services ecosystem.
Alex Brown was the Founder & CEO of 10th Magnitude, which was acquired by Cognizant in 2020. 10th Magnitude (now Cognizant Microsoft Business Group) provides businesses with transformative technology services using the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud. Alex also serves on the boards of Courser, a managed service provider, and Protera, an SAP service partner.
HPA congratulates the Empirical team on this significant milestone and is excited to support the company’s ongoing growth.
Read more about it here: Press Release