With a $5M investment, Tysons’ Bandura Cyber is rebranding as ThreatBlockr

After a decade in the game, NoVa cybersecurity company Bandura Cyber is looking for a refresh. And it’s just landed the funds to make it happen.

The 20-person company based out of Tysons, Virginia was founded in 2012 and is ringing in 10 years with a relaunch as ThreatBlockr, thanks to a $5 million investment round it announced last week.

The SaaS-based cybersecurity platform was actually spun out of another company from St. Louis, Missouri, and added VC funding in 2018. This fresh funding round was led by Gula Tech Adventures, Tenfore Holdings, Saul Holdings and Lord Baltimore Capital Partners, alongside other new and existing investors.

Current CEO Brian McMahon, who joined the company in 2019, told Technical.ly that ThreatBlockr is unique in its focus on IP addresses and domains in its cybersecurity work.

“For us, everything comes down to an IP address or a domain,” McMahon said. “A lot of our customers will find that we are protecting them from things that make it through several different layers of their security stack, and that’s just a design of how things work. But because we’re only looking at IP addresses and domains, we have a unique ability to stop threats at scale.”

The main work of ThreatBlockr is an “active defense” method. Its platform deploys direct intelligent and cyber intelligence data, but instead of putting the info into a firewall, it looks directly at domains. This way, McMahon said, the company can look at about 150 million IP addresses and domains in its work. So far, the company has about 50 partners and is looking to add more, and currently has offices in Tysons, Chicago and St. Louis.

With the investment, CEO Brian McMahon hopes to add engineering and data positions later in the year.

According to McMahon, there’s no secret to the rebrand: The company just wanted a name that better reflected its product offerings. In its decade of life, the company has moved further into the enterprise and cloud spaces. Over the past two years, he added, ThreatBlockr has doubled down on building out its product.

“We felt like this was more descriptive of what we do and the product that we’re relaunching back into the market,” McMahon said.

With the investment, ThreatBlockr will be focused on expanding its sales and marketing team in the short term. But McMahon also hopes to add engineering and data positions later in the year. The company’s latest move also includes some growth at the C-suite, adding Oracle alum George Just as its chief revenue officer and Courtney Brady as its new VP of marketing.

The company’s expansion comes at a crucial time for cybersecurity. ThreatBlockr’s data, McMahon said, shows that someone is getting hit with a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, and he hopes the company’s growth can help keep up.

“What we’re focused on is being able to solve those stats at scale and quickly,” McMahon said. “So part of what we bring to the table is the ability to, when these events happen and the industry starts to publish data on them, we can very quickly adjust that data into our platform and deploy to all of our customers really quickly.”