Qevlar AI founders
In the modern age, with any number of bad actors online, company Security Operations Centres or SOCs tend to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of threat alerts they must manage. Forrester found that just three cyber attacks can trigger thousands of alerts, while Gartner estimates that 70% of a security desk’s time can be sucked up by attacks.
Paris-based Qevlar AI automates these threat alerts and, in some cases, actually deals with them.
It’s now raised $30M in an early-stage funding round jointly led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International, with participation from EQT Ventures & Growth.
Customers now include Mercedes-Benz and Sodexo, and managed security service providers (MSSP) including Orange Cyberdefense, ECI, and Atos.
Qevlar says it can turn alert investigations into “security insights” such as trending data not normally available to companies.
Of course, the world of cybersecurity is not short of providers. Startups in the space include Dropzone AI, which has raised $57.4m according to Dealroom.
Others include Radiant Security and Prophet Security. But larger players are CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk (now owned by Cisco).
In our podcast, Ahmed Achchak, Qevlar AI Co-Founder and CEO told Pathfounders that he wasn’t even in cyber before he started the company, but it was the application of AI to cyber that motivated him to go up against these players.
“Comparing ourselves to those solutions is a good question… Cyber security is a weird space where it just feels like everyone is a competitor to everyone else… but… the reason why our customers keep choosing us, and we've been compared to all the names that you have mentioned… is, when it comes to security operations, when it comes to autonomous systems, again, trust is important. And when we say trust, it means two things: one, the ability to understand what the AI is doing, and the ability for the AI to be consistent. And two, the ability to measure performance, the ability to compute the accuracy of the system,” he said.
“We’ve been benchmarked against all our competitors. And what it comes consistently.. is that our customers find that we have the best accuracy. We have the lowest false negatives,” he added.
Damien Henault, partner with Forgepoint Capital, told Pathfounders, they are doubling down their existing investment: “We were really impressed by the progress in the last year. In cybersecurity, a lot of companies tend to retrofit AI inside the stack… which is not truly autonomous. So the first thing I really liked about Kevlar, the team, it’s a truly native AI company, not retrofitting… and providing a truly autonomous solution, and that's really unique in the market. Secondly, the team is a combination of… highly technical, driven, ambitious, eminently coachable,” he said.
“So we found a unique company in Europe with a better platform and the potential to be a global leader in the space,” he added.
This certainly isn’t the last we will see of these new AI-first cyber startups.