Dragos raises $10M Series A, plans hiring

Fulton-based cybersecurity startup Dragos closed on a $10 million Series A, the company announced Monday.
The funding round was led by Energy Impact Partners and Allegis Capital, with participation from Fulton-based DataTribe.
Dragos’ founders met while working in the intelligence community, where they worked on a mission to identify, analyze and respond to nation-states launching cyber attacks against industrial control systems. That’s the critical infrastructure providing key functions for society like electricity, drinking water and transportation. One example of their work emerged earlier this year, when the company made a key discovery about a piece of malware that was used to cause a power outage in Ukraine. Dubbed CrashOverride, it’s the only known malware that targets a power grid.
“Protecting the integrity of the grid has always been a top priority for utility operators,” Sameer Reddy, a vice president at EIP, said in a statement. “One of the critical challenges is access to sufficient human capital. The Dragos platform, which is built and managed by true ICS cybersecurity experts, provides significant force multiplication to ICS operators around the world.”
The company raised a $1.2 million seed round in the summer of 2016. Over the last year, the company formed partnerships with Deloitte and CrowdStrike. With the new funding, the company is planning to hire to add to its current team of about 25 people. CEO Robert M. Lee expects about 10-20 hires in the coming months.
Along with funding, the startup got help from DataTribe along the way. As its founders told us earlier this year, that Fulton-based company specifically seeks out intelligence community tech, and work with technologists who developed it to build a company. The idea is to prepare for a Series A in about a year, which held true in Dragos’ case.