Celebrating Uptycs Series A Milestone: Reflecting on the Journey

Today, we announced our $10M Series A funding led by ForgePoint Capital and Comcast Ventures.

Read the press release here. 

Three years ago a conversation - over coffee and in the company of my co-founders – changed the trajectory of my entrepreneurial journey. We were discussing how fragmentation is a major problem in the cyber security industry. What do I mean by fragmentation?  Just take a look at the exhibit floor at RSA Conference and observe the ever-growing sea of vendors offering point solutions, each with their own agent collecting relevant data and covering only a portion of what is needed to achieve good cyber hygiene.

The vast majority of these solutions are closed and proprietary, and only extensible by convincing the solution vendor to add some new features to its product roadmap, which could take many months or even years. Within a category, each vendor claims theirs is the best.  But based on what, the security credentials of the founders and technical leadership team?  You can’t look inside the products to see what is going on. It’s more of a “trust me, I know what I’m doing.”  Adding to the problem is that each solution comes with its own UI and threat intelligence, and doesn’t easily share data with other solutions, except through a third solution, typically a SIEM.

As entrepreneurs, we knew there had to be a better way to solve this problem.  Instead of having point solutions collecting overlapping data from the same endpoints, storing the data separately and then performing some form of proprietary analytics to create reports, alerts, etc., why not have a single open source agent collect a wide range of system data where analytics could be applied to solve multiple cyber security challenges? We looked to Salesforce and SAP and were inspired by what they have done for the CRM and business process and operations industries having laid a sound foundation by building a platform that modeled their sector requirements into tables and relational databases. This structured foundation, coupled with SQL, allows them to address diverse functional requirements and create a compelling customer experience.

 This was the premise (after many spicy Sichuan meals and white boarding sessions) upon which we built our vision:  single open source agent, common data store, and lots of easily created and modified views of the collected information using SQL. The way the data is collected and queried is open, enabling collaboration among security professionals. In April 2016, Uptycs, Inc. was formed and shortly after we teamed up with Comcast Ventures, Genacast Ventures and Founder Collective for our seed round to hire a team and begin building on our vision.

Today, I’m very excited to share that in the company of an amazing team and delighted customers, we’ve partnered with ForgePoint Capital and Comcast Ventures for our Series A funding. [read the full press release here] As we hit this incredible milestone, I look back at the various challenges we’ve overcome, and I’m filled with great pride by the way this team has consistently executed on our quest to make Uptycs the next "Salesforce for security analytics", providing SQL powered views of data for fleet visibility, intrusion detection, vulnerability monitoring and compliance, with much more to come.

Before I end the this note, I’d like to thank the Osquery team at Facebook as they have given us a jump start by providing us with a universal open source agent adopted and supported by an ever-growing community of users.