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Hey there, it’s tech reporter Alexandra Sternlicht filling in for Allie.
It seems there’s not a week that goes by without a major firm announcing a cyberattack. Last week it was Microsoft who shared that a China-sponsored cyberattack compromised over 8,000 servers worldwide, including major banks, government entities, and health care companies that stored works in the software giant’s Sharepoint product.
To combat attacks of this ilk, one upstart has raised a combined $38 million seed and Series A and is now emerging from stealth. Today, I’m sharing the news that alums of Microsoft cyber protection product Sentinel have launched cybersecurity company Legion with $38 million in funding co-led by Accel and Picture Capital, with participation from Coatue and angel investors who work at companies including Google, Crowdstrike, and Wiz.
Also, you’ve probably never heard of Picture Capital. That’s because this also marks the first public U.S. announcement of the venture capital firm helmed by cybersecurity heavyweights Michael Fey and Dan Amiga (cofounders of $4.8 billion cybersecurity tech company Island) as well Mickey Boodaei (CEO and cofounder of Transmit Security). The firm’s founders have pooled their capital together (they’re not saying exactly how much) to invest in cybersecurity companies.
Legion, among Picture’s first investments, is a security operations center (SOC) that uses AI to detect threats within users’ computer browsers. This is different from the most popular SOC technologies on the market like Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Sentinel, and CrowdStrike that largely detect threats via network, server, or other computing endpoint layers.
“The problem was staring right at me every day,” Legion CEO and cofounder Ely Abramovitch told me via Zoom, reflecting on his nearly five years managing Microsoft Sentinel. “My customers had very little automation in place and were struggling…this was getting worse with AI at the hands of attackers with the scale and complexity of attack rising exponentially.”
Seeing the failure of Microsoft and other enterprise technologies to meet the new crop of sophisticated and enormous attacks motivated Abramovitch and his Sentinel colleague Michael Gladishev to leave Microsoft, enlist machine learning expert Eyal Fisher, and start Legion in 2024.
Though the startup is emerging from stealth with this announcement, Legion already has dozens of customers that include a major financial institution and other “Fortune 20” companies, for whom Legion responds to threats 90% faster than existing players, according to Abramovitch.
For Picture Capital investor Fey, who was the chief operating officer at Symantec and chief technology officer at McAfee before founding Island, Legion’s technology is unparalleled. “Large companies do amazing things, but it’s hard to beat a well-funded startup on a specific problem,” he says of Legion. “I haven’t seen any real innovation on this out of the larger players. Not because they can’t, but because the reality is that this takes a specific set of technologists, a specific set of engineers, and it’s an expensive problem to solve.”
Alexandra Sternlicht
X: @iamsternlicht
Email: alex.sternlicht@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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