With a $5M raise, Reston’s Tidal Cyber wants to shake up cybersecurity

After nabbing a $5 million seed round, NoVa’s Tidal Cyber is planning to make waves in the local industry.

Tidal Cyber, a 20-person startup based in Reston, was founded by CEO Rick Gordon, CTO Richard Struse and CIO Frank Duff – all MITRE veterans. The startup works in threat-informed defense in conjunction with MITRE’s ATT&CK platform, which the founders helped build. Squadra Ventures led the round, which will help grow the company, alongside existing investors.

Gordon told Technical.ly that the cofounders incorporated the company in late 2021, Gordon said, and officially left MITRE in January 2022. They decided to create the startup after hearing from MITRE customers, who Gordon said are some of the largest consumers of security products in the world.

“They just continually asked us, ‘Well, that’s really interesting, you’re building these adjacent capabilities to MITRE ATT&CK and we value them, but we really need this baked into a SaaS-based platform,’” Gordon said.

Tidal Cyber’s platform helps security teams automate identification, triage and remediation, which saves time for analysts. With the company’s framework, customers can easily embed ATT&CK, identify threats with a threat profile builder, see a prioritized to-do list for threat response, view a map of cyber capabilities to ensure the best configurations and assess posture.

Tidal Cyber’s strategy is a newer way of thinking, Gordon said, but it’s one that cyber professionals can connect with.

“It is new, it is a new category, that’s our cross to bear,” Gordon said. “But when I show security leaders how they can do what they think they’re, they should be doing, the light bulb almost always comes on. They didn’t realize it was possible to do security this way and they want to be able to do it this way now.”

With the funds, Gordon said he plans to expand the team, likely doubling its size over the next year. There are also still a lot of features he’d like to add to the platform. He’s really hoping to hone in on ensuring that Tidal Cyber’s product addresses an issue in the market and thus has space to grow.

But with this round, he noted, Tidal Cyber can demonstrate how it can grow in a difficult market and pave the way for future investments.

“It really was exciting to be able to get through what is really been challenging for a lot of our peers, with the quality of investor that we’ve got that really does understand us, shares our sensibilities and also shares our vision for driving the adoption, globally, of threat-informed defense,” Gordon said.