As we head into the heart of summer and the Black Hat USA conference, things have been heating up in our community of cybersecurity innovators and supporters. Verituity and Huntress both announced new funding rounds- congratulations to both companies on entering exciting new chapters! We are also thrilled to welcome seasoned cybersecurity leaders Elizabeth Butwin Mann, Don Duet, and Paul Lanzi to our Advisory Council. Shane shared his thoughts on how subversive threats can lurk in the background and harm companies over the long term in our latest TIPS blog. Last but certainly not least, we're headed to Las Vegas for Black Hat in early August along with several of our portfolio companies. We hope to see you there! 

Coming to Black Hat USA 2024 in Las Vegas? Meet key innovators from the Forgepoint porfolio.

Financings and M&A

Huntress, the leader in managed endpoint detection and response, announced $150M in Series D funding led Kleiner Perkins, Meritech Capital, and Sapphire Ventures. This funding will accelerate product development, research and strategic acquisitions as Huntress continues to fortify the backbone of the global economy: SMBs and small enterprises. Congratulations Huntress on becoming a unicorn with a $1.55B valuation- and approaching $100M in annual recurring revenue (centaur status)! Read the press release, Huntress' blog post, and coverage in Reuters and WSJ.

Verituity, a leading provider of intelligent, verified digital payouts, announced $18.8M in additional Series A funding co-led by Forgepoint Capital and Sandbox Industries alongside Ardent Venture Partners and MTech Capital. The new funding will help Verituity expand its offerings into verticals including insurance and payment processing. Congratulations Ben, Chris, and the Verituity team! Read the press release, Don's blog post, and coverage by Axios.

Advisory Council Updates

Please join us in welcoming three distinguished leaders to the Forgepoint Advisory Council: 

Elizabeth (Liz) Butwin Mann, former Strategy and Growth Leader- Americas Technology Consulting at EY. Elizabeth is a seasoned executive with 30+ years of cybersecurity, IT, culture and workforce transformation, and operational experience. She most recently grew EY’s Technology practice into a $4B+,10,000-person business and previously served as EY’s Americas Cybersecurity Consulting Leader. She previously spent 16 years with cybersecurity consultancy Mycroft, Inc where she served as President and began her career managing technology and identity management programs for Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company.  

Don Duet, Public Cloud Strategy lead at Fortinet, former CEO and co-founder of Concourse Labs. Don is an accomplished business and technology leader. In 2018, he co-founded cloud security startup Concourse Labs and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Fortinet. Prior to that, he was a Senior Advisor at McKinsey. Earlier in his career, Don spent 28 years at Goldman Sachs in senior leadership roles, establishing the firm’s business systems architecture, trading and risk management platform and strategic investments in VDI, Data, AI / Cloud and software defined infrastructure.

Paul Lanzi, Founder and Principal Consultant at IDenovate, former Founder and COO of Remediant (acq. by Netwrix). Paul's career spans IT leadership roles in the biopharma (Genentech, Roche, Gilead Sciences) and telecom (SBC, now AT&T) industries with an emphasis on identity and identity security. At IDenovate, Paul assists Fortune 100 companies retooling their identity teams and solution stacks. Paul holds a BS in Computer Science from UC Davis and volunteers his time with the IETF (Identity-related standards), Scouting America (District Commissioner for SF) and the Cybersecurity Non-Profit (Board Advisor).

The Latest Insights

TIPS #17: Subversion: The silent third dimension of cybercrime Shane discusses how subversive threats can slip under the radar and how threat actors can abuse access to a company’s systems and data for their own benefit, featuring 1Kosmos, Bishop Fox, Constella Intelligence, Huntress, Lynx, SPHERE, Surefire Cyber, and Symmetry Systems.

Portfolio Company Updates

1Kosmos was recognized as an Overall Leader in Passwordless Authentication for Consumers in the latest Leadership Compass Report by KuppingerCole. Congratulations team 1Kosmos!

NowSecure achieved SOC 2 compliance and remains the only enterprise-grade mobile application security testing (MAST) provider with a SOC 2 certified cloud platform. Well done on this impressive accomplishment!

Rafay was honored as a Gold Stevie Award Winner in the 2024 American Business Awards. Congratulations to the team!

BREAKTHROUGHS

Huntress launched Phishing Defense Coaching, a new program in Huntress Security Awareness Training that helps employees learn from their mistakes to identify phishing.

Lynx announced the launch of Lynx Mule Account Detection, a real-time money mule detection solution for banks and financial institutions. 

Synadia released NATS .NET 2.3.0 with .NET Standard support, allowing seamless integrations with Framework and Unity.

INSIGHTS

1Kosmos CTO and Co-Founder Rohan Pinto announced his book "Decentralized Identity Explained: Embrace decentralization for a more secure and empowering digital experience". The book is set to launch on August 9th and is available for preorder.

Bishop Fox CEO Vinnie Liu joined the Claroty Nexus Podcast to discuss the role of offensive security testing during incidents.

Constella Intelligence analyzed the recent increase in major data breaches driven by threat group ShinyHunters and compared it to the "golden age" of breaches from 2019 to 2021.

CyberCube highlighted how they utilize AI to solve problems in the insurance ecosystem.

Lumu issued an advisory on the recent Snowflake supply chain attack and provided recommendations on how to protect your company from similar threats.

Nudge Security showcased how it helped consumer insights company Stravito scale its SaaS security and governance program.

ReversingLabs released their latest Chainmail newsletter on a malicious npm package targeting AWS users, the importance of the Spectra Assure Community, the Polyfill.io supply chain attack, and more. 

SPHERE provided insights on the hidden risks of service accounts and how to protect your organization.

Surefire Cyber Chief Delivery Officer Joe Tarraf was a guest on the Dark Reading Confidential podcast where he discussed interacting and negotiating with cyber threat actors. 

Uptycs CISO and VP of Product Strategy Kevin Paige wrote an article for C4ISRNET on how the Pentagon's cyber strategy focuses on defending the nation, preparing for cyber warfare, and building cyber resilience.

Upcoming and Recent Events

7/11, 10am PT Synadia is hosting its next weekly meet and greet with the creators and maintainers of NATS.io. Participants can ask questions about anything from architecting distributed systems to implementing various pieces of of the NATS ecosystem.

7/11, 11am PT SPHERE and CyberArk are hosting a webinar on how SPHERE's Intelligent Discovery and CyberArk's PAM solutions can transform your security posture. 

7/18, 8am PT ReversingLabs is holding their Q2 2024 Threat Research Round-Up on topics including on VS Code and Nuget and more. 

ON DEMAND Bishop Fox Solutions Architect Alissa Gilbert led a webcast dispelling myths around WiFi and radio frequency tracking.

ON DEMAND Converge Insurance CTO Thomas Beale provided insights on how to assess AI risk management frameworks in a panel at the NetDiligence Cyber Risk Summit in San Diego. 

ON DEMAND Huntress hosted the latest episode of Tradecraft Tuesday on how to thwart attackers during the initial access phase of attacks. 

ON DEMAND Lumu released a video showing how the Pysa Ransomware Group targets schools and government sectors and encrypts critical files, and how Lumu detects and stops these threats.

ON DEMAND Nudge Security led a webinar on how to simplify IT governance tasks like user access reviews, IT offboarding, vendor security reviews, and more with Nudge.

ON DEMAND Rafay hosted a webinar on how to build a cohesive cloud infrastructure strategy and eliminate infrastructure siloes. 

ON DEMAND SolCyber launched the first episode of Tales from the SOC, a new podcast series exploring the world of the Security Operations Center with co-hosts Paul Ducklin and SolCyber CTO David Emerson.

PORTFOLIO JOBS

Looking for your next career opportunity or know someone who is? Browse or share our portfolio company job board.