By Adit Singh, Partner at Cota Capital
Security is getting more complex, with sophisticated new cyber threats wreaking havoc on a daily basis. Traditional approaches to security automation no longer suffice in today’s dynamic environment. What’s more, at the same time that threats are getting more advanced and stronger, talent to defend against them is getting more scarce.
Despite the pressing need for skilled professionals, there is a notable shortage of talent, with over 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs remaining unfilled. This puts immense pressure on those already toiling in security roles, leading to overwork, perpetual stress, and job burnout. The resulting turnover causes organizations to further lose their collective security knowledge and best practices, which in turn makes the job even harder for the remaining employees.
This problem in security will only get worse, as the bad guys use AI to automate their attacks. Nowadays, literally anyone with bad intentions can grab off-the-shelf AI tools to create and deploy malicious software. It’s clear that we can no longer do security manually. We must use AI ourselves to automate the task.
That’s why Cota Capital is proud to have led Simbian’s oversubscribed $10 million seed funding round, a fully autonomous security platform powered by generative AI. Simbian doesn’t remove humans from the equation—it empowers them to do more. In fact, the company’s name, Simbian, is derived from the symbiotic relationship between humans and AI.
Fully autonomous security allows organizations to prioritize the most effective activities and set proper directions for security. AI can do tactical implementations while the directions are set by humans. It’s the best of both worlds, as humans have control of the overall security environment, while the actual product security is done by AI.
Simbian enables people to do more
The Simbian platform offers secure and intelligent AI solutions that are designed to be adaptable to various IT environments, which ensures maximum coverage of the security surface. The platform accelerates the process of resolving security issues by helping security teams address their rapidly changing and urgent requirements.
Simbian has a copilot feature that monitors user actions and environments while continuously learning and adapting over time. The copilot learns to perform increasingly complex tasks independently, reducing the need for constant human intervention in routine security chores. Ultimately, this allows users to concentrate on more strategic aspects of security management.
Users simply state their goals and business context using everyday language and Simbian’s innovative platform, powered by patented LLM technology, offers tailored suggestions and executes automated actions across various environments. This approach results in improved security, increased adaptability to changing business demands and threats, and lower costs.
Today, for instance, security analysts spend a lot of their time on repetitive tasks like manually updating firewall rules, reviewing log files for anomalies and generating routine compliance reports. The truth is that many of these tasks can be automated through AI, freeing security analysts to focus on more strategic areas.
Simbian starts off by learning about a company’s unique cybersecurity processes and architecture. It can effectively navigate through various security tasks, such as managing security protocols and decommissioning systems access when an employee leaves the company. It can also perform more intricate operations. With Simbian, nothing falls through the cracks or is ever left to chance because AI can be counted on to always deliver.
Simbian team has the chops to solve today’s security challenges
At Cota, we’re investing in AI startups that will eat the services layer in various enterprise functions, starting with cybersecurity analysts. In 2023, the cybersecurity services market size was valued at $208 billion, and it is projected to reach $445 billion by 2032. We expect AI to appropriate a large chunk of that budget.
Another aspect that excites us about Simbian is the quality of the team. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Simbian co-founder Ambuj Kumar previously, and I believe he brings a unique and ideal background to today’s security challenges. He was most recently the co-founder and CEO at Fortanix, a successful data security company, where he raised more than $135 million and established the confidential computing security category. Before that, Ambuj was a lead designer on NVIDIA GPUs and served as chief architect at Cryptography Research Inc. His collective experience, from GPU to cloud, gives Simbian a unique advantage in the market.
Simbian’s co-founder and CTO, Alankrit Chona, has an extensive background in high-scale platforms and data engineering from his time at Twitter and was a founding member of successful startups Afterpay and Spotnana.
I couldn’t be more thrilled for Cota Capital to partner with Simbian as the company leads the way to fully autonomous security.