Senseon raises $6.4m to disrupt Cyber Security sector with AI triangulation

Last week one of our cyber security clients Senseon announced the completion of their seed funding round of $6.4m (£4.9m). The investment round was led by VC fund MMC Ventures, alongside Mark Weatherford, former Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane Venture Partners and CyLon also participated in the investment.

The funding will allow Senseon to continue its rapid growth and expansion in the UK, while gaining a stronger presence in EMEA and US.

Senseon was founded in 2017 by David Atkinson, the first ever cyber operative within the UK’s specialist military units. Its innovative approach to threat detection is based on what Atkinson calls ‘AI Triangulation’, a system he developed after working in cyber security for private enterprises and at a national level.

AI Triangulation ensures complete visibility across organisations’ entire digital estates, detecting genuine cyber threats amongst the noise and traffic of busy networks. The platform uses AI to learn and adapt to a company’s digital environment in order to provide highly accurate threat detection. This is invaluable for reducing fake cyber threats, something that the average organisation wastes 425 hours a week investigating, and costing them $1.37m per year.

Lead investor MMC Ventures is a research-led venture capital firm. Founded in 2000, the firm has backed more than 60 high-growth technology companies from seed to series A stages, including CloudSense, Gousto and SafeGuard. MMC focuses on scaling enterprise software and consumer internet companies with the potential to disrupt huge markets. Based in London, the firm is investing c. £40 million annually.

Mina Samaan, Investment manager at MMC Ventures, said: “Cyber security continues to be the number one priority for technology deployments by CIOs. Organisations of all sizes need to get better at keeping pace with emerging threats, but more importantly, identifying the attacks that require intervention. Senseon’s technology directly addresses this challenge by using reinforcement learning AI techniques to help over-burdened security teams better understand anomalous behaviour through a single holistic platform.

“This is an evolving and difficult problem which requires a world-class team to solve it. We have been very impressed with David and the Senseon team and are excited to be a part of their next phase of growth.”

Co-Investor CyLon Co-Founder, Grace Cassy, said: “Businesses see real value in the way Senseon’s product – through the use of AI Triangulation – can provide them with one cohesive platform that protects their organisation from emerging threats, replacing the need to purchase and maintain multiple single-point solutions.”