AUSTIN – Spyderbat, Inc. announced today that it has raised $4.2M in seed funding led by LiveOak Venture Partners and Benhamou Global Ventures with participation from cybersecurity veteran, John McHale. The company will use the capital to accelerate development of its product launch later this year.
The Spyderbat founding team includes cybersecurity pioneers Marc Willebeek-LeMair and Brian Smith, former founders and executives of Click Security and TippingPoint. Venu Shamapant from LiveOak Venture Partners and Venkat Raghavan from Benhamou Global Ventures have joined the company’s board of directors.
“Security operations today lack clear information to identify and resolve early indications of a threat,” states Spyderbat’s CEO Marc Willebeek-LeMair. “Shifts to cloud-native environments exacerbate this challenge. Today, triage and investigation are painfully complex, time-consuming, and often lead to erroneous or inconclusive results. We realized an entirely new approach was needed to revolutionize security operations to radically improve its efficiency.”
“Marc and Brian are addressing one of the biggest challenges in security operations,” says Venu Shamapant, Founding Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners. “We recognize the experience of the founders to deliver market-changing innovations and are excited to accelerate their efforts.”
Long-time cybersecurity veteran John McHale adds, “I have known Marc and Brian for a long time and am continually impressed with their ingenuity, passion, and inventiveness they bring to each of their companies. With TippingPoint, they realized an entirely new solution was needed for recognizing network-borne threats and invented the IPS. Similarly, they have wiped the board clean and invented entirely new capabilities with Spyderbat.”
“ Security analysts are forced into bad tradeoffs from lack of time, inexorable alert volumes and ambiguous context, which lead to missed early warning signals from ignored alerts and inconclusive investigations. Marc and Brian are pioneering a new approach to reimagine security operations in the Cloud Native world,” says Venkat Raghavan from Benhamou Global Ventures.
“We are grateful to have the backing of LiveOak Venture Partners, BGV, and John McHale,” adds Marc Willebeek-LeMair. “Their wisdom and support strengthens our ability to continue innovating and delivering high-value solutions to enterprise customers.”
About Spyderbat
Spyderbat develops innovative solutions to radically change the way organizations handle early threat discovery and investigation. To track our progress, follow us at: www.spyderbat.com
About LiveOak Venture Partners
LiveOak Venture Partners is a venture capital fund based in Austin, Texas. With 20 years of successful venture investing in Texas, the founders of LiveOak have helped create nearly $2 billion of enterprise value. While almost all of LiveOak’s investments begin at the Seed and Series A stages, LiveOak is a full life cycle investor focused on helping create category leading technology and technology-enabled service companies headquartered in Texas. LiveOak Venture Partners has been the lead investor in over 30 exciting high-growth Texas-based companies in the last seven years including ones such as CS Disco, Digital Pharmacist, OJO Labs, Opcity and TrustRadius .
About Benhamou Global Ventures
BGV is an early-stage venture capital firm with deep Silicon Valley roots and an exclusive focus on digital transformation of enterprise with a cross-border innovation theme. The BGV team has successfully built and implemented a cross-border venture investing model with companies from Israel, Europe and Asia. BGV currently has 21 active companies in its portfolio with a majority conceived outside Silicon Valley, and now headquartered in the US. The fund was founded by Eric Benhamou, former chairman and CEO of 3Com, Palm and co-founder of Bridge Communications. Comprised of an experienced partnership team of global operating executives and investors, BGV is often the first and most active institutional investor in a company, leveraging a powerful network of technical advisors, executives and functional experts who actively engage with portfolio companies. The firm has offices in Palo Alto, California, Tel Aviv, Israel and presence in France and in India through the Arka Venture Labs.
