Ellicott City-based cybersecurity firm Huntress acquires San Antonio startup’s technology

Ellicott City-based cybersecurity company Huntress is acquiring the technology of San Antonio, Texas-based startup Level Effect.

In a deal announced Tuesday, Huntress will acquire the tech and IP for Level Effect’s product, Recon. It is an endpoint detection and response product. Going forward, Huntress will add Recon to its security platform. Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan said in a statement that this will allow its platform to “respond to malicious network sessions, event logs and non-persistent threats, allowing us to support broader cybersecurity use cases and defend additional attack surfaces.”

Level Effect cofounders Greg Ake and Robert Noeth will join Huntress to support the initial integration and development of its software.

As Noeth put it in a statement: “We’re looking forward to frustrating a lot of hackers.”

The companies share similarities. Both founding teams bring a background in the intelligence community, with members of each having experience inside the Fort Meade-based National Security Agency. As they built companies, they also both shared a mission of bringing more advanced cybersecurity technology to small and medium-sized businesses who don’t have as many tools to protect their networks and data as larger organizations.

Founded in 2016, Huntress has been growing over the last year. After validating a model with support from local incubators and building revenue, the company raised $18 million in a Series A round that closed in February 2020. It has since more than tripled the size of its team to 70 employees.

For its part, three-year-old Level Effect will continue on as an independent business. It will offer cybersecurity training services for people seeking to gain and advance skills.