With a $10M raise, NoVa cyber startup Silent Push just emerged from stealth

Reston, Virginia’s Silent Push is, pardon the pun, making some noise upon its emergence from stealth on Wednesday morning — a move made with a $10 million raise.

Silent Push is a detection-focused threat intelligence company founded by CEO Ken Bagnall and John Jensen in early 2020. Ten Eleven Ventures, a cybersecurity specialist investor, led the round.

Bagnall and Jensen began working together 15 years ago, most recently teaming up at FireEye, which acquired their previous company The Email Laundry. Bagnall said that both were disappointed with historic threat intelligence methods, which they felt didn’t provide early warning information to help companies defend themselves. The result was Silent Push.

“Everything that people were given for threat intelligence was post-breach information from someone else,” Bagnall told Technical.ly. “So it was saying this affected someone else last week and therefore you should block it because it might affect you, but that’s not how threat actors work.”

With Silent Push, Bagnall, Jensen and their 30-person team created a large data collection platform that they call a global early warning system. The company, which has employees all over the world, uses this system to conduct re-resolutions of all DNS records every day before finding all related subdomains that exist and scanning the endpoints. When attacks are automated, Bagnall said, the infrastructure leaves a fingerprint on the changes that were made. Once they’ve found those behaviors, Silent Push maps that to each group that manages a company’s infrastructure. The startup also offers this info to other security vendors.

As the company emerges from stealth, the $10 million will largely go toward expanding sales and marketing globally. Until now, the company was funded via angel investors and friends and family, making this the first large influx of venture capital.

On top of the global moves, Bagnall said that the company will continue identifying gaps in security products, updating its model and platform and making new data types to keep up with attackers.

But for now, he sees the fresh funds as a good sign of what’s to come.

“The tech industry as a whole is struggling to get funding at the moment,” Bagnall said. “So for us, it’s a great show of confidence in the technology we’ve developed and all of the new capabilities that we’ve made available to the industry as a whole.”