Today finds me incredibly humbled to announce SenseOn’s $20 million Series A funding round, led by Eight Road Ventures (ERVE) and supported by our existing investors MMC Ventures, Crane Venture Partners and Winton Ventures Limited. The funds we have secured will be used to achieve our mission of delivering the security architecture for the future, to protect and empower organisations, reduce stress for leaders, costs for businesses; and drive forward operational efficiencies for security teams.

Whilst this is an incredibly exciting milestone for SenseOn, we recognise that this continued belief in our mission by our investors is preceded by the substantial belief of many courageous and innovative security leaders that have already invested their time, thoughtful feedback and budget to enable us to achieve this milestone in the first place.

Mission critical

Recent news headlines underpin the fact that our mission has never been more important than it is today; the threat landscape in which organisations find themselves operating has never been more treacherous, and the stakes have never been higher for those organisations targeted. Today, it is a question of when, not if we will get attacked and it is the privilege of myself and the SenseOn team to support organisations, businesses and governments globally as they embark on their own missions to stop ransomware, data exfiltration and sophisticated attacks whilst they digitally transform their organisations to perform even better in the future.

Crazy idea

I first wrote about our ambitious vision to build the security architecture of the future in November 2018 as we were beginning to take our ground-breaking research from a theoretical concept into the reality of a market-ready product.

Throughout those early days, the consensus was that our crazy idea would remain just that - an idea, and one which would prove impossible to translate into reality. However, in the three years since I penned that blog, we have moved from working to persuade one person at a time of the technical benefits of our approach, to developing a rapidly growing community of courageous information security leaders who have delivered significantly better outcomes for their organisations through partnership and collaboration with SenseOn. It’s testament to this community that we are still here today, and I thank them for their ongoing support, constantly pushing us to go further and faster.

About the author

David Atkinson, Founder and CEO, SenseOn

Before moving into the cyber security industry, David spent over 15 years working within the UK’s specialist military units where he was the first cyber operative. His combined experience and technical abilities gained from his background in military, government and the private sector has led him to challenge the current approaches to cyber security and to create SenseOn.

Product Investor Fit

Finding the right fit with prospective investors is essential for any company at our stage. For us, it was important that any investor we partner with at this stage have an extremely high degree of empathy for the community we exist to serve. Our relationship with ERVE began a few years ago at one of the global security conferences where the quality of the technical understanding of the challenges faced by security professionals by the ERVE team was notable amongst their peers. Over the last few years and multiple conferences and latterly virtual meetings our relationship has grown from early technical chats over a drink to sharing with ERVE our vision and us understanding their shared belief that there was “a better way” to design and deliver security architecture. Throughout the process, it was easy to explain, and ERVE understood, the profound implications of the innovations we have made, and the impact they have for our customers. We are delighted to welcome Alston Zecha, an ex-Founder himself to the Board of SenseOn from ERVE.

High growth muscle memory

As you would no doubt expect, this announcement also brings with it other changes to our Board of Directors, and I was delighted when Jeremy Duggan agreed to join the board. Jeremy is one of the most inspirational leaders that I have had the pleasure to get to know since leaving the military. Jeremy brings with him his wealth of experience, garnered over 25 years of leading sales and go-to-market initiatives at some of the world’s highest-performing sales organisations such as AppDynamics. Jeremy has done the SaaS pre-IPO journey successfully three times now, bringing not just profound knowledge but also inspirational leadership around the focused execution required to grow a successful software business.

Innovating at pace for security teams

The growing momentum from the community we have built around us in recent years has made us ever-more determined to push the technical boundaries of what is possible in security engineering, data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We have been afforded the opportunity to share our research with the very communities we serve at leading international conferences, such as the Conference for Applied Machine Learning in Information Security (CAMLIS), the Bank of America’s Technology Innovation Summit and the Goldman Sachs Disruptive Tech Summit, amongst others.

Since our inception in 2017, we have been deeply humbled by the recognition our breakthroughs have received from industry peers. SenseOn’s ability to automatically detect, investigate and respond to malicious activity - the part of our product we call AI Triangulation - resulted in us receiving the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET)’s “Cybersecurity Innovation of 2019” award. We weren’t going to stop there though: next came the unique ability to deploy an entire security architecture across the enterprise estate, via a single piece of software. The development of our “universal sensor” resulted in our recognition by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a Technology Pioneer in June 2021, despite our relative infancy as a company.

Combining easy access to timely, complete and consistent data across any infrastructure, with the mature capabilities of our AI Triangulation to automate the process of threat detection, investigation and response, SenseOn is beginning to transform the role of security teams from reactive to proactive overwatchers of their organisations’ digital estates. No longer are teams struggling with the volume of information and velocity of false-positive alerts; rather they are empowered by SenseOn’s platform to focus on what really matters: driving forward the business’s security posture, enabling safe and secure digital transformation. 

An amazing team

We have a long way to go, these milestones are an opportunity to reflect and be grateful to those that have enabled us to get this far and so last but not least I must call out the amazing passion, talent, grit and innovation of the whole SenseOn team, in particular James Mistry our CTO, Jack Hughes our Head of Product, Brad Freeman our Head of Threat Analytics and Nick Brodie our FD. If you possess these qualities along with a deep empathy for the security community then we would love to speak to you as we are hiring across every role.