IONIX has secured an additional $15 million to take its total Series A funding round to $42 million. The additional funding was led by new investor Maor Investments. Other monies came from existing investors Hyperwise Ventures, Team8 and US Venture Partners (USVP).
The announcement brings the total funding raised to $50.3 million, including a seed round of funding. The company has also expanded its Board of Directors with the addition of cyber veteran Chad Kinzelberg.
Marc Gaffan, CEO of IONIX, said, “Security leaders at global companies recognize that more digital assets mean more security risks, and it’s impossible to fix everything.
“Our mission is to give them the widest possible view of their attack surface looking from the outside in, like an attacker would. Then we focus on their critical exposures to help them effectively prioritize. The strong market uptake we have experienced underscores both the important nature of this problem and the value our solution brings to our customers.”
What is the money for?
IONIX has identified two main uses for the money. The first is to accelerate the company’s go-to-market activities. What is not clear is whether that is to enlarge the sales team, support partners or open new offices. The second and most important is to expand the Threat Exposure Management capabilities of its Attack Surface Management solution.
According to the announcement, the latter will, “further advance the company’s platform and give enterprises a unified view of critical exposures from the complete enterprise attack surface across cloud, on-premises, SaaS and digital supply chains.”
What is the IONIX platform?
IONIX is an Attack Surface Management (ASM) vendor. ASM is about continuous monitoring of all technology assets in order to detect and remediate any vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
The IONIX platform starts with the discovery of all assets, with the vendor claiming that its customers discover 50% more assets. It further claims that this reduces the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). While the claim is bold, the company says that this is because it reduces the noise associated with other ASM solutions.
It uses the analogy of radar to describe how it is continuously monitoring devices. It puts them into different groups such as IT-operated, vendor-managed and those in the digital supply chain. Once devices are identified, they are constantly monitored for a range of issues, from vulnerabilities to data leakage.
One of the selling points is how it tracks the lateral movement of an attack through an organisation. This is a key element not just for remediation of the attack but for forensic analysis of the attack.
It also prioritises all issues, including patching and remediation. This is something that most organisations struggle with. The mantra of patch, patch, patch is only effective if you know what you are patching and what to patch first. Shotgun approaches to patching consume time and resources with no evidence they significantly improve the reliability of systems.
IONIX provides an interesting view of priorities and required actions by using three images – blast radius, exploitability and threat intelligence. That combination makes the platform interesting. For most security teams, it will deliver more realistic actionable intelligence than they get from trying to combine multiple solutions.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
ASM is still an emerging approach to security. There are a number of vendors in this space and others that have tools that do part of the solution. Many are built on larger and more complex platforms but suffer from information overload. It kills the ability of cybersecurity teams and IT to effectively manage systems.
It will be interesting to see what IONIX adds to its platform to improve it. The press release states that it will include the development of the product roadmap and an expansion of the Threat Exposure Management capabilities. However, it stops short of giving more detail.
Kinzelberg commented, “The Attack Surface Management market holds immense potential, and I see IONIX as an innovator within it. As ASM shifts from niche to mainstream, IONIX is leading the next generation by focusing on what customers really need – advancing from simple asset discovery to exploitability-based prioritization – using proprietary technologies like their ‘Connective Intelligence.”
