SUMMARY
Founded in 2019, FireCompass helps companies recognise attack surface risks and mitigate them
The funding round was led by Cervin and Athera Venture Partners with existing investor Bharat Innovation Fund (BIF) also participating
The startup plans to use the fresh funding to expand operations across India, the US and other countries
Bengaluru and Boston-based FireCompass, which works on automating Red Teaming, has raised $7 Mn in a funding round led by Cervin and Athera Venture Partners. Existing investor Bharat Innovation Fund (BIF) also participated in the funding round.
FireCompass plans to use the fresh funding to expand operations across India, the US and other countries, while also hiring personnel.
Founded in 2019 by Bikash Barai and Priyanka Aash, FireCompass offers a SaaS platform for Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART) and Attack Surface Management (ASM). For the uninitiated, red teaming is a commonly used cybersecurity practice which provides an organisation with security feedback from an antagonist’s perspective.
In other words, a ‘red team’ at a company would attack the systems and then give feedback for improving cybersecurity even further. FireCompass automates the process and provides consistent feedback to the companies, enabling them to develop better security features and resilience in the eventuality of an actual cyberattack.
Its platform is said to automatically discover an organisation’s ever-changing digital attack surface, including unknown exposed databases, cloud buckets, code leaks, risky cloud assets, exposed credentials, APIs and open ports.
Once discovered, its attack engine then launches multi-stage attacks, which include network, social engineering and application attacks, which are otherwise missed by conventional ethical hacking tools, including SuperScan, Network Mapper, Metasploit, Angry IP Scanner and others.
“Organisations typically test some of their assets some of the time, whereas hackers are attacking all of the assets all of the time. At FireCompass, our vision is to make Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART) available to all so that organisations can continuously discover and test all their assets at all times – just like the real attackers,” said Bikash Barai, cofounder of FireCompass.
According to its website, FireCompass caters to companies such as US-based telcos T-Mobile and Sprint, along with Nykaa, Airtel Payments Bank, Hero, L&T Technology Services and others.
Preetish Nijhawan, managing partner, Cervin, said, “FireCompass’ technology is a game-changer for organisations looking to stay ahead of cyber threats. Their automated red teaming and attack surface discovery capabilities provide unparalleled visibility into exploitable risks, and we are excited to partner with the FireCompass team as they continue to innovate and grow.”
India is one of the countries which face the highest volume of cyberattacks. According to a report by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), India faced 12.68 Lakh cyberattacks in 2022 till November 30, down 10% year-on-year (YoY).
Recent funding rounds in the cybersecurity segment include SafeHouse Tech raising $6 Mn in December 2022 and Silence Laboratories raising $1.7 Mn in seed funding in September 2022.
