Deep Instinct Raises $100M To Block Endpoint, Network Attacks

Deep Instinct plans to use 35 percent of its Series D funding for research and development to help enterprises autonomously process and analyze all of information coming from their security products.

Deep Instinct has raised $100 million to build out a channel organization and expand its prevention capabilities from the endpoint to the network and cloud.

The New York-based cybersecurity startup plans to use 35 percent of its Series D funding for research and development to help enterprises autonomously process and analyze all information coming from their security products, according to CEO Guy Caspi. The BlackRock-led funding round will help Deep Instinct expand outside North America and get at least half of its sales coming through the channel.

“We are growing super-fast,” Caspi said. “The market demand is super, super big. The opportunity is big.”

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Although endpoint prevention is still most of Deep Instinct’s business, Caspi said preventing network-based attacks accounts for a substantial and growing portion of the company’s revenue. Deep Instinct’s network prevention technology protects communications coming in and out of an organization such as with Office 365 or an on-premise storage server, according to Caspi.

Deep Instinct plans to use some of the funding to get into safeguarding cloud workloads by placing its agent in AWS or Google and working with them. Ninety-five percent of Deep Instinct’s installations today are already in the cloud – the company only sells on-premise to government agencies and certain large enterprises – and customers increasingly want to consume services directly from vendors, he said.

As far as endpoints are concerned, Caspi said Deep Instinct’s agentless offering can sit on top of an organization’s entire collection of endpoints with a single gateway and block attackers before they get in. The company’s prevention technology is often installed alongside CrowdStrike’s detection and response-focused offering and Tanium’s endpoint visibility and control capabilities, according to Caspi.

“Deep Instinct is the first and the only deep learning cybersecurity platform, and one of only four or five deep learning frameworks in the world,” Caspi said. “This is something very unique, allowing us to bring prevention in almost zero time.” Deep Instinct is looking to roll out a major new product once every six months for at least the next year-and-a-half, according to Caspi.

From a go-to-market perspective, Caspi said Deep Instinct wants to use the channel as a force multiplier when going after SMB and mid-market customers. The company plans to invest a huge effort in building out a channel organization that can work with the SHIs and CDWs of the world as well as MSSPs, Caspi said. Deep Instinct today mostly goes direct to Fortune 500, Global 2000 and big-name clients, he said.

From a geographic standpoint, Caspi said Deep Instinct would like to increase its share of business outside North America to between 30 percent and 35 percent. Deep Instinct plans to focus on the most innovative international markets, which includes the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands in Europe as well as Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand in Asia-Pacific.

Deep Instinct was founded in 2015, employs 207 people, and has raised $200 million in seven rounds of outside funding, according to LinkedIn and Crunchbase. Thursday’s Series D funding comes just 14 months after the company closed a $43 million Series C round led by Millennium New Horizons.

Netsurion has been working with Deep Instinct for the past 18 months and leverages the company’s prevention technology as part of its managed threat protection service, said A.N. Ananth, president of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based MSSP. Ananth likes the portability of Deep Instinct’s offering, and signatureless approach, and its ability to support emerging platforms like iPadOS and Chromebook.

“A lot of buyers understand that endpoint protection is a real problem,” Ananth told CRN.

Going forward, Ananth would like to see Deep Instinct provide more visibility into how its technology fared against high-profile attacks like the SolarWinds breach and the Microsoft Exchange compromise. Ananth also hopes Deep Instinct pursues closer alignment with the MITRE ATT&CK framework as well as multi-tenant capabilities for MSSPs.

“This is a fast-moving space, and attackers are constantly raising the bar,” Ananth said.