As Seen in: Pulse 2.0

Auguria Raises Seed Funding From SYN Ventures And S Ventures

McLean, VA – March 19, 2024

Auguria, a cybersecurity artificial intelligence company, announced its emergence from stealth mode after more than two years of software platform development. Through an initial investment from SYN Ventures Seed Fund, Auguria is driving the transformation of traditional security operations by optimizing data for human and AI consumption with the industry’s first vector-based cybersecurity platform for security operations data integration, transformation, and analytics.

Auguria’s Security Knowledge Layer (or Auguria SKL) identifies whether an event is unique or has similarities to others by transforming data into vector embeddings and pairing it with insight and organization. Auguria uses AI/ML to reduce data noise, lowering storage and processing costs. At the core of Auguria’s platform is a vector database and embedding engine driven by the unique security knowledge model and ontology distilled from extensive real-world security operations experience.

AI automation offers many benefits to SecOps teams. When processed with the Auguria SKL, data is de-noised, which means AI processes it and determines what is normal and not a risk. The remaining data is the proverbial needle in a haystack. By classifying and setting everything normal aside, what surfaces are the previously unknown tactics and techniques that adversaries are iterating upon. This is mapped into a visual ontology to give better context.

KEY QUOTES:

“Companies worldwide are struggling under the weight of millions to billions of security events that their infrastructures are producing. CISOs and their teams often do not know if they are compromised by adversaries because the meaningful clues these systems produce are difficult to isolate and interpret. SYN is pitched by multiple companies every week, especially with AI-based ideas, but what stood out about Auguria was how they are cleverly applying AI to solve an enormous problem, that is, data overload, situational awareness, and the cost of data storage.”

– Dan Burns, Auguria Board Member and Committee Chairman at SYN Ventures Seed

“Organizations are often on the backfoot as adversaries relentlessly attack. One mitigation effort is to send every bit of telemetry to expensive SIEM analytic platforms with the hope that staff can stop maliciousness before it has a chance to do damage. This isn’t working so well anymore because the volume of data needing analysis with the human interpretive touch is in the stratosphere.” Permeh, former Chief Scientist at McAfee and co-founder of Cylance, acknowledges that something has to change. “Auguria has figured out a way to eliminate 99% of the noise from event data so that SecOps teams can focus with a high degree of confidence and that the remaining 1% is indeed interesting and actionable. Their SKL platform is highly effective at revealing what was previously unknown in the environment which is a holy grail for threat hunters.”

– Ryan Permeh, Board Observer and Operating Partner & Investor at SYN Ventures

“Amidst data deluge, a significant challenge emerges: distinguishing data related to genuine threats from the multitude of benign noise. This task is not only complex but also critical for effective threat detection and response. Consequently, many organizations opt to retain all gathered data, erring on the side of caution. This approach, however, leads to a substantial increase in SIEM costs.” Salem goes on to add, “To mitigate these burgeoning SIEM expenses, a practical strategy involves the meticulous identification and elimination of duplicate, repetitive data, followed by the strategic categorization of the remaining data based on its necessity for either immediate investigation or long-term storage for forensic and compliance purposes. Auguria makes identification of anomalous activity extremely easy while simultaneously unburdening security analysts. And also diverting uninteresting telemetry to storage that is less expensive.”

– Shlomi Salem, S Venture’s CTO

“The giant challenge security teams face today is too much data and too little time. Analytical tools have not kept pace with the ever growing complexity of data. As a result, security teams often develop all sorts of hightouch manual workarounds and often with repurposed tools usually designed for something else. Every security team I speak with says the same thing. They want modern data analysis solutions tailored specifically for security practitioners. This is exactly why we started Auguria. Our methods streamline and automate the entire process, from data ingestion to analysis, to enrichment and prioritization so that analysts can go directly to the step of responding to an incident versus spending vast amounts of time sorting, filtering, and triaging billions of data points. We’re super excited that Auguria is already making people’s heads turn.”

– Chris Coulter, Auguria CTO and Co-Founder

“We are thrilled to have the trust of our investors SYN Ventures and S Ventures as we introduce this new technology to the market. We are confident that customers that give us a look will see that we really can help them accelerate and modernize their SIEM operations by feeding in actionable and prioritized data that analysts can managebly act upon while at the same time giving them the option to divert run-of-the-mill, non-controversial events to less expensive storage.”

– Keith Palumbo, Auguria CEO and Co-Founders

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