After adding customers and service upgrades, Blackpoint Cyber raises $7M Series B

This summer, Ellicott City-based Blackpoint Cyber released a new version of its service, closed a funding round and is looking to hire.

It comes as the company, which draws on its tech platform and security operations center to detect and respond to threats, has seen its customer base double since the COVID-19 pandemic began, said CEO John Murchison.

BlackPoint raised $7 million in its Series B funding round. The company also said on Tuesday that John N. Stewart, former senior VP and chief security and trust officer at Cisco, will join its board of directors. Having served in senior cybersecurity leadership roles over three decades in the U.S. and Australia, Stewart is currently president of Talons Ventures, which is an investor in Blackpoint.

“I’ve been seeking something like this out for a very long time,” Stewart said in a statement. “After seeing the technology, business plan, success-to-date, and the team’s passion, I’m honored to be joining their board.”

He joins the board alongside former T-Mobile CEO Hamid Akhavan and leaders of two firms who invested in the company: Adelphi Capital CEO Tom Donohue and Telcom Ventures founder Raj Singh.

With the Series B coming a couple years after a $6 million Series A, Blackpoint Cyber is one of a cluster of cybersecurity companies founded by former defense and intelligence cyber experts that have taken up a base in the area around Fort Meade, which is a home for the U.S. government’s cybersecurity operations.

The company offers its technology by working with managed service providers, which provide IT functions for small and medium-sized companies so they don’t have to build in-house teams. The team at the company’s security operations center uses its platform, called SNAP-Defense, to monitor and detect breaches, map the various endpoints on a network and more. With analysis provided by the center’s team, the company can also take action to stop the breaches. The company recently released a 4.0 service, which has 200 new capabilities that analysts working in the center can draw on, as well as a tool to pick up on specific kinds of tradecraft by attackers.

Murchison said a main focus is on detecting what automated tools can’t, and the system is designed so that it integrates with workflows and is “data-efficient” so a user doesn’t have a lot of alerts coming at them all at one time.

“You have to do smart automation and we prefer an application where we’re collecting the data at the right time as opposed to collecting it and having to sort through it after the fact,” he said.

Over the last two months, the CEO said there has been an uptick in malicious activity, with the pandemic and shift even further to digital operations conducted remotely.

“One of the things we have noticed that has happened over and over again is there’s a lot more focus on bad guys attacking VPN appliances,” Murchison said, referring to virtual private networks that are often used during remote work.

This has coincided with the uptick in customers for the company. Going forward, Murchison said the company is planning for more product launches. It also going to pick up marketing activity, with a new director hired in that department this month. Blackpoint will also continue hiring to add to its team of about 40 people, with current openings for a director of threat operations, a senior software engineer and analysts.