Why We Invested in Noetic
Today we’re pleased to announce our investment in Noetic Cyber.
As specialist investors who focus only on cybersecurity, we have long recognized the vast, first-order problem posed by the increasingly large and constantly changing attack surface of most enterprises today: if you can’t see it, in real-time, you can’t protect it. The development of new cloud-based ephemeral architectures and work-from-home employees accessing corporate resources with new personal devices has only added to the size of this headache. How security leaders can instill continuous visibility and controls within a sprawling, dynamic, increasingly cloud-based organization is a tough challenge – and getting tougher with every remote employee hired, new geography added, or additional API or SaaS tool introduced to the system.
When our former Entrepreneur-in-Residence Paul Ayers told us he was developing a new way to solve the visibility and controls challenge – alongside his experienced and talented co-founders Allen Hadden and Allen Rogers – we were thrilled. We knew how unique and vital their solution would be, given their special insight and technical acumen. Our experience working with this talented group in previous companies, including at Ten Eleven founder Alex Doll’s company PGP, gave us unwavering confidence – we knew this team truly understood the problem set and had the technical proficiency to solve it.
We backed the stealth company, Noetic Cyber, in the seed round in early 2020. Throughout the challenging year that followed, the Noetic founders put their heads down and got to work on refining their technology. The team worked remotely, across three continents, to develop a platform that was truly differentiated from first-generation cyber asset management companies thanks to continuous, real-time visibility; a dynamic, graph-based map to understand the interrelationships of all cyber entities; and with elegantly automated response to enforce controls as soon as non-compliance is detected.
Noetic’s founders were able to immediately hire terrific talent, including an outstanding group of developers, a UX specialist, and former IBM marketing leader Jamie Cowper to help strategize and execute on go-to-market. Another testament they were headed in the right direction: as soon as we reached out to our network to tell them about the exciting platform Noetic was developing, we received enthusiastic interest and many offers to help. We are thrilled that our longtime friends and collaborators Niloofar Razi Howe of Energy Impact Partners, Richard Horne of PwC, Jim Reavis of the Cloud Security Alliance, and Nick Warner of SentinelOne were all early advisors for the company and continue working with the team today. The advice of this group and many others helped Noetic get to where it is today – launching out of stealth with its Series A and $20 million of funding behind it.
Noetic Cyber is now bringing its premier continuous cyber asset management and controls platform to the market full-force, ready to help security teams make faster, better decisions with superior visibility, insights, and response capabilities.
We are pleased to be joined in this journey by Energy Impact Partners, lead investor for the Series A round, and by Glasswing Ventures, with whom we co-invested in the Series Seed. Together with the advisory board, we are thrilled to support the brilliant, agile team and tech that Noetic has built. We look forward to a great year ahead for Noetic Cyber and thank them for inviting us to be a part of it.
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