With a $30M raise, DC’s DNSFilter is hiring and building out its cybersecurity product arm

Fresh off a $30 million Series A funding round, cybersecurity org DNSFilter has huge growth plans for product expansion, employee headcount and development. The round was led by Insight Partners with support from Arthur Ventures.

“There were some things that we knew we wanted to do that we could only do with more funding,” Content Marketing Manager Serena Raymond told Technical.ly.

DNSFilter, a remote company with a Northwest G Street address, primarily works in content filtering, allowing companies to block malware, phishing domains and crypto-jacking. One particular focus, Raymond said, is on newly created domains that were registered in the last 30 days.

While the 2015-founded company has seen a few angel investments, this is the first funding of this scale, Raymond said. Primarily, the funding will be used for research and product development and refining threat protection capabilities as well as hiring. One focus will be its fingerprinting product, which looks for patterns in malicious sites using artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company reports 14,000 customers internationally and plans to block more 1.1 million threats daily by the end of 2021.

“Real security threats like to hide in the shadows,” said Mikey Pruitt, product manager at DNSFilter. “They don’t announce their presence but they need to get resources or instructions from the internet at some point and that’s when we’ll see a domain cluster. We will determine what a set of domains represents — either a threat or something benign. This is the fingerprint.”

On top of the product development, DNSFilter will be using the raise to continue its team growth. It’s already doubled in size over the past year, and has a goal of adding 80 people by the end of the year in primarily remote positions. (See open roles here.) The new team will be supporting a number of departments in the company, including the product and fingerprinting developments.

“Especially in a startup environment, you have to pick and choose your projects,” Raymond said. “So, this is just going to mean that we can do more.”

With the raise, DNSFilter has also added board members including former CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch and Thomas Krane from Insight Partners to help with its expansion plans. Particularly, Raymond added that DNSFilter will be looking to ransomware protections as it moves forward.

“We’re really committed to building this team and growing so that we can do more with DNS security and DNS protection,” Raymond said.