Funding to fuel international expansion and accelerate the development of new AI capabilities as demand grows for autonomous solutions that find and fix vulnerabilities

January 17, 2024 07:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Vicarius, developers of vRx, the industry’s first fully autonomous end-to-end vulnerability remediation platform, today announced a $30 million Series B led by cybersecurity investment firm Bright Pixel (formerly Sonae IM). AllegisCyber Capital, AlleyCorp, and Strait all participated in the financing. The company’s total funding, including investments from previous investors such as JVP, is now over $56 million. The vulnerability management market is expected to grow to over $21 billion by 2028.

“We are immensely excited to partner with the Bright Pixel team. Their wealth of experience will help us grow our company to the next level”

Vicarius is disrupting the market with fully automated and autonomous vulnerability remediation solutions that proactively reduce cyber risk for businesses. Legacy solutions create too many alerts and too much work for overburdened security teams. According to research by independent analyst firm Omdia, traditional vulnerability management (VM) tools that enable enterprises to identify, prioritize, and remediate software security vulnerabilities have increasingly struggled to meet the needs of organizations embracing digital transformation. With an exponentially expanding attack surface, organizations are facing an exposure window of up to 60 days on average after a CVE is known.

The funding comes fresh off the release of vuln_GPT—the company’s proprietary LLM technology that writes detection and remediation scripts and ushers in an era of assistive technology for security teams—and follows on record-setting 5x growth over the last year, driven by customer demand for a single platform that consolidates, personalizes, and scales the vulnerability remediation process. Since the company’s last round of funding in 2022, Vicarius has grown its customer base to over 400 customers, adding global organizations like PepsiCo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Bupa, and Equinix, along with more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies.

“Whenever we look at companies in the growth stage, we not only consider the founders’ mission and objectives but also the intangible factors that often get overlooked when assessing market potential,” said Fernando Martins, Investment Director at Bright Pixel. “It was clear from the multiple discussions that we had with Michael, Roi, and Yossi that their team-building skills are elite. It’s this special combination of deep technical expertise with strategic hiring that makes Vicarius a very attractive company for us.”

The capital will be used to accelerate the company’s expansion at a global scale and support its growing base of worldwide customers, from North America to Europe. The funding will also further advance Vicarius’s AI roadmap and industry-leading pace of product innovation while continuing to support the company’s community initiatives such as vlabs, the R&D division dedicated to developing free security tools for the cybersecurity community; vsociety, the community for security researchers and hackers that has grown to over 5,000 members; and vconnect, the partner dashboard with unparalleled visibility into the commercial pipeline from trial to close.

“The platform itself is remarkably user-friendly, making it accessible to both beginners and experts alike,” says Jakab Akos, a vsociety member. “But what truly sets vsociety apart is its awesome community, who support and inspire each other on a journey of continuous learning and exploration in the world of information security.”

vRx is the company’s flagship, consolidated vulnerability remediation solution that upends the traditional vulnerability management market and meets the needs of today’s organizations. Leveraging in-house AI technology, Vicarius automates much of the discovery, prioritization, and remediation workload plaguing security and IT teams. An early adopter of product-led growth (PLG), Vicarius’s self-service model changes the cybersecurity solution buyer’s paradigm by letting customers transparently test and find value in vRx before purchasing.

Vicarius began AI integration with script generation using vuln_GPT, which creates detection and remediation scripts for vulnerabilities. With the new funding, the company will continue to innovate and integrate AI further into its product platform, eventually encompassing all modules, including prioritization and automation. This first-player move will help to eliminate the manual work of creating and implementing policies for applying patches as well as for Patchless Protection (when patches have not been developed or deployed).

“We are immensely excited to partner with the Bright Pixel team. Their wealth of experience will help us grow our company to the next level,” said Michael Assraf, CEO of Vicarius. “Vicarius is best positioned to take on the much-needed task of transforming the vulnerability management market from assessment to remediation. We are committed to growth and have been hard at work creating solutions that will be flexible to the changing AI landscape, all while staying core to our mission of protecting our customers from vulnerabilities.”

About Vicarius

Vicarius helps security teams protect their most critical apps and assets against software exploitation through vRx (formerly TOPIA), the company’s autonomous end-to-end vulnerability remediation platform. Founded by three security experts and backed by tier-one cyber investors from Silicon Valley, Vicarius’ mission is to provide customers with problem-solving solutions that proactively reduce risk wherever computer software resides. Learn more at https://vicarius.io.

About Bright Pixel Capital

Bright Pixel Capital, formerly known as Sonae IM, is the technology investment arm of the multinational group Sonae. With special focus on cybersecurity, infrastructure software, retail technologies, business applications and emerging tech, it has a portfolio of more than 50 companies, from early to growth stages. Bright Pixel Capital acts as a partner that brings specialized know-how, global footprint, and a wealth of experience in helping companies from early stage to IPO. Learn more at brpx.com.

Contacts

Leslie Kesselring
Kesselring Communications for Vicarius
leslie@kesscomm.com

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