Binalyze, a Tallinn, Estonia-based provider of Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) solutions, has just raised $19M in Series A funding. In conjunction with the funding, Founder and CEO Emre Tinaztepe, answered our questions about the company, the product, the funding, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Emre, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I established Binalyze in 2018. I started my 15 year long cybersecurity career in the endpoint security and malware analysis space with Comodo, and Zemana, and I have been actively involved in software development for over 20 years now.
I have actively managed and lead security teams at Zemana in projects developing antimalware engines and keyboard encryption solutions to fight against keylogging threats. With my background in cybersecurity, I understand the damage external threats can have on an organization, and I employ my skills and knowledge to help those affected get back on their feet.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Binalyze. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
Since the company’s inception, the mission has remained the same: to disrupt and innovate the digital forensics industry. Binalyze’s goal is to realize a marketplace where forensics is more accessible to a broader set of use cases. To achieve this democratization of digital forensics, we created an agile, scalable, remote, automated solution that easily integrates into other security platforms.
Since January 2021, Binalyze has been aggressively expanding to close this gap in the market and meet the growing demand for new DFIR solutions that enable enterprises and MSSP to effectively investigate post alert or breach. From my experience, I have observed that it is no longer about whether an organization will suffer a breach but a matter of when, and decision makers are starting to take notice of this reality. We want Binalyze to be in a position where those industry leaders can come to us once they’ve reached that conclusion.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
Binalyze is a cybersecurity company focusing on Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR). Binalyze’s platform, Binalyze AIR, delivers end-to-end investigation capabilities to the Security Operation Center (SOC), and differentiates itself from existing solutions by focusing on investigation and collaboration, rather than blocking and monitoring. A stark contrast from legacy forensics solutions, Binalyze is fully accessible by web browser, fast, and automated.
It achieves this by collecting more than 350 types of digital forensic evidence in less than 10 minutes. The Binalyze AIR platform possesses transformative performance when compared to legacy digital forensic solutions.
Once evidence has been collected through automatic or manual processes, security teams can begin their investigation within the same platform. This allows investigative teams to seamlessly transition from evidence collection to triage, creating timelines, remediating via remote shell or automating compromise assessment.
Binalyze also streamlines the DFIR processes by automating significant analytical processes and integrating with other security platforms such as EDR, SOAR, SIEM and XDR to automatically initiate investigations around the clock.
Finally, Binalyze AIR has broad compatibility across Cloud, off-network and on-premise assets, and offers full visibility for Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS and ESXI devices. This allows for investigations to be started and completed from a single platform.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
This latest round brings Binalyze to a total of $30.5 million raised to date via pre-seed (Jan 2021) and seed (Jan 2022).
In response to enterprise cyber resilient strategies and the “Assume Breach” mindset, we are experiencing a growing demand for new DFIR solutions. The timing of this round will allow us to react and adjust to these market conditions effectively and continue our rapid scaling approach to consolidate and expand our position as the market leader.
The investment has already helped the approaching October launch of Binalyze AIR 4.0 and its Investigation Hub. As the heart of Binalyze’s DFIR platform, the Investigation Hub enables security analysts and incident responders to investigate across hundreds of devices from a single dashboard.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?
We cannot disclose revenue numbers, however since our last funding round in January 2022, Binalyze has:
- Scaled the team from 20 to 80 employees
- Established US GTM team
- Launched Mac compatibility and greatly enhanced and standardized our feature set across all platforms
- Launched Azure and AWS cloud forensics capability
- Grown ARR 4.1x in 2022 (tracking for similar performance again in 2023)
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
We plan to use this next phase of our growth to bolster our market outreach efforts and the team supporting those efforts. We also plan to further our research and development efforts by investing resources into Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) technology to integrate it into existing incident response processes. Furthermore, we’re looking to bolster our worldwide customer support to continue to provide excellent service to our partners.
FinSMEs
12/09/2023