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April 24, 2023
Austin, TX – April 24, 2023
A startup based in Austin and San Diego thinks it might have one of the best solutions out there to combat ransomware attacks. Halcyon Tech Inc. calls itself the world's first cyber resilience platform specifically targeting ransomware before its initial intrusion, using artificial intelligence and exploiting ransomware features. For example, it tricks ransomware into aborting or revealing an attack by exploiting features in the ransomware itself.
Halcyon said April 20 it closed a $50 million series A funding round led by SYN Ventures, with additional investment from Dell Technologies Capital and Corner Ventures.
A company representative told Inno that about 20% of Halcyon's workforce is based in Austin, including co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ryan Smith, a former Cylance Inc. vice president of research and adviser. The company said it chose Austin for its HQ because it's a standout technical innovation hub with a lot of engineering talent.
"When setting out to build Halcyon, we started with the premise that all cybersecurity solutions are inevitably bypassed," co-founder and CEO Jon Miller stated. "We engineered Halcyon to embrace failure as a core concept of protection. Stopping ransomware requires multiple prevention and detection techniques, all trained extensively on years of actual ransomware attacks. This funding positions us to rapidly scale our mission of making ransomware unprofitable and enable resilient enterprises around the world."