The artificial intelligence powered cybersecurity startup CYR3CON has completed a $1.5M seed round financing led by New York-based Scout Ventures.

Many cyber attacks such as NotPetya spread through larger enterprises in seconds - leaving security teams scrambling. To address this need, CYR3CON combines artificial intelligence and information from malicious hacking communities to predict cyberattacks. For example, CYR3CON's solution automatically scouts the hacker communities and uses machine learning to help prioritize vulnerabilities that hackers most intend to use in an attack. CYR3CON gained notoriety with predictions concerning several major attacks - including WannaCry and NotPetya - receiving coverage by CNN and The Economist.

Originally funded by grant funding from the U.S. government, CYR3CON has gained recent traction with multiple Fortune 500 enterprises as well as cybersecurity service providers (such as MSSP's). The initial traction led the company to seek additional capital to continue the momentum. "After gaining insights from a variety of CSO's and end-users, we felt that we could bring the platform to a wider market." said Co-Founder and former DARPA Fellow Paulo Shakarian, the firm's CEO.

"At Scout we look for seed stage startups that use AI in creative ways. CYR3CON exemplifies this," stated Scout Ventures partner Wes Blackwell, "their unique combination of AI with automatically extracted hacker conversations is shifting clients from a reactive to a proactive security posture." Blackwell will also be joining CYR3CON's board.

The oversubscribed round also includes several notable angel investors who are advising the company and bring significant cybersecurity experience. These include Michael Sutton (former CISO, Zscaler), Aleksandr Yampolskiy (CEO, SecurityScorecard), Steven Witt (former CEO, Onyara and Partner/Co-Founder of DataTribe), and Steve Hassell, (former CIO, Emerson). More recently, CYR3CON has joined the fall cohort of Dreamit Venture's SecureTech accelerator - which is actively introducing CYR3CON into a variety of F500 companies and follow-on investors.

About CYR3CON
CYR3CON combines machine learning and data mined from hacker communities (i.e. darkweb, deepweb) to predict cyberattacks. The platform-based solution allows for use cases such as attack prediction and vulnerability prioritization. This provides corporate security professionals the means to take early action and avoid cyber-attacks.