trackd recently emerged from stealth with a $3.35M seed round and a unique approach to vulnerability and patch management, which aims to automate remediation without fear of disruption - one of the top reasons given by operators for slow patching. With its unified platform, trackd leverages the collective experience of security and IT teams, and is set to make its mark on the cybersecurity community in 2023. Flybridge led the seed round, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, SaaS Ventures, and Expa. We sat down with Mike Starr, CEO and Founder of trackd, to learn more about the organizational security challenges trackd helps solve and long-term goals for the company.
Can you tell us about your cybersecurity startup and what sets it apart from other players in the industry?
We are a unified solution for vulnerability management that both identifies vulnerabilities on our customers’ devices, but also patches them, all from the same platform. Very few companies in the market are doing both in a single platform, so we’re in rare company there. However, what sets us apart from everyone is our patching experience data. Our solution records data about every patch applied using it (e.g. did the patch brea, anything?), anonymizes it, and shares it with all other users across our entire customer base. So, when someone is about to apply a patch, they have data on if that patch has a history of disruption or not, and can therefore patch more aggressively and intelligently. We’re the only ones in the market with that data.
How do you plan to utilize the seed funding you recently received to grow and expand your business?
The primary use of the seed funding will be to continue developing the product (we’re currently in beta), and in marketing efforts to bring the solution to the vulnerability & patch management community.
In today's ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing businesses and organizations, and how does your startup address those challenges?
The biggest challenge is the proliferation of cyber threats driven by the advent of digital currency (or cryptocurrency) and the subsequent ability for bad actors to easily monetize their attacks. This means there are more players motivated to commit cybercrime. Couple that with the development of more sophisticated malware, tools, and Initial Access Brokers, and thus it takes much less technical skill to launch an attack today than it did 5 or 10 years ago. Unfortunately, cyber crime has been democratized.
To combat this, organizations of all types and sizes have to invest in a layered security approach; there is no magic bullet, and the bad guys only have to be right once. In a layered security approach, the first item is to close and lock your doors, or in the language of the business, identify and remediate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible, before the bad guys can find and exploit them. The problem is operators are afraid to patch, because they expect software updates to be catastrophic. That’s where trackd comes in. By giving remediation practitioners insight into how patches have performed in other environments in addition to the tools and data to inform their decisions and patch more aggressively, we reduce the time vulnerabilities are exposed, giving the bad actors less time to take advantage of them.
What are your long-term goals and aspirations for your cybersecurity startup, and how do you plan to achieve them?
Our long-term vision is to be the world’s leader in preventing cyber attacks and make auto-patching as ubiquitous as HTTPS is for websites.We’re planning to raise another round of funding later this year to continue and accelerate our product development as well as our go-to-market activities, incorporate ML/AI capability, build integrations with a number of security products, and grow it into a comprehensive cyber risk management and mitigation platform.
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