In the world of startup innovation, funding is the jet fuel that thrusts founders and entrepreneurs to move forward and fulfill their dreams, as bold and ambitious as they may be. The saying “an army marches on its stomach” may be lent to “a startup marches on its funding”. 

Our end in mind when raising this Series B funding round was to enable a significant leap towards the company’s vision of becoming the world’s cyber security validation authority. This means automation, algorithm-based and completely “hands-off” penetration testing routines. In a technology combersed security market that spends very little on accuracy validation, automation is the dire need.

The Revolution is Here

Pcysys’ vision seems almost unachievable to the distant viewer. People struggle to comprehend that creating the technology to emulate a human ethical hacker is even possible, similar to the challenge of developing the autonomous car. I attribute this to the perception of ethical hacking as an art known by a selected few. An ethical hacker is required to have extensive knowledge of a wide selection of technologies, to be creative and pervasive in the search of finding a weak spot and exploiting it. So how can it be productised?  

While building PenTera, our automated penetration testing machine, we’ve always been guided by the human hackers, taking no shortcuts on the way  to emulating them. For instance, no installation or requirement of software agents on the network prior to the attack (which is “cheating”). It also means the need to inject inert malware into operating system processes to test whether the end-point security actually kicks in to prevent the activity. We purposely and continuously choose the “hard way” that requires true emulation of an attack, rather than compromise on a simulation of it. Consequently we stay true to creating value for our customers in revealing true deficiencies in cyber defenses and enable them to improve their practises. 

To the Extensive Pcysys Family 

Due to the (very!) hard work from the entire Pcysys team along with the funds we received, we have fulfilled the first part of the vision. A special acknowledgement is due to our customers who entrusted us with their business and have advised and helped improve the product over time.

We still face a few challenges, and the current round will help us surpass them. This round will enable us to accelerate all fronts from R&D to Sales and Marketing and through delivery. Our product portfolio will expand and cover automated testing for more components of today’s attack surface.

I would like to thank and congratulate Insight Partners for supporting and joining our unique journey and at the time thank Awz and Blackstone for their ongoing trust and support from previous rounds. We’re privileged to have investors that are such leaders in their own domains, but also happy to lend a hand whenever needed.

This is Pcysys. Onward and upward!