Content, Endpoint/Device Security

Minerva Lands $7.5M VC funding for Endpoint Anti-Evasion Platform

Minerva, one of a number of cybersecurity startups entering the endpoint market, has landed $7.5 million in Series A funding, as investors continue to bank on the segment’s growth potential.

The company intends to use the money to ramp up sales and marketing of its Anti-Evasion platform, an endpoint security layer that constructs a virtual reality to blunt unknown threats capable of skirting an organization’s existing defenses. The goal is to help enterprises secure their endpoints and boost the effectiveness of their standing security.

Eddy Bobritsky
Eddy Bobritsky

Minerva did not elaborate on its sales and marketing plans but its technology could provide MSSPs with another endpoint security tool. Specifically, the Anti-Evasion platform aims to control how malicious software “perceives its reality.” Indeed, the idea behind Minerva’s endpoint solution is in itself stealthy: By manipulating how malware perceives its environment, the solution turns the strength of evasive malware into a weakness before any damage is done.

The end result is that the technology creates a virtual reality on the endpoint that causes malware to disarm itself.

“Endpoint defenses that attempt to detect malice by extrapolating from previously-seen patterns are subject to evasion,” said Eddy Bobritsky, Minerva co-founder and CEO. “We are focused on preventing threats that are designed to evade existing defenses without attempting to seek and identify malware, introducing unique capabilities to significantly strengthen the endpoint's security posture,” he said.

Endpoint Security Evolution

The fast growing endpoint security market has expanded substantially in the last year with the field widening and competition heating up among the smaller, newer players jockeying for position to challenge the heavyweights, including Dell, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec.

Minerva will compete with the likes of Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, Cyberbit, Cylance and other options such as CounterTack, which just landed $20 million in Series D funding to add to the $10 million its secured last November.

Market researchers have taken note of the segment’s growth potential, although estimates of its size differ. MarketsandMarkets figures the global endpoint security market will jump to $17.3 billion by 2020, or a 50 percent turn upward from 2015. Similarly, Mordor Intelligence figures the sector will grow 70 percent to about $14 billion by 2019. By comparison, Statista estimates the market will hit about $5.8 billion by 2019.

Others such as Grand View Research are looking further out, pegging the segment to hit $27 billion by 2024, driven by a spike in the number of enterprise endpoints and mobile devices having access to corporate data.

Amplify Partners led the Minerva funding round with StageOne Ventures and Webb Investment Network also participating.

D. Howard Kass

D. Howard Kass is a contributing editor to MSSP Alert. He brings a career in journalism and market research to the role. He has served as CRN News Editor, Dataquest Channel Analyst, and West Coast Senior Contributing Editor at Channelnomics. As the CEO of The Viewpoint Group, he led groundbreaking market research.