Cynomi cinches $37M for its AI-based ‘virtual CISO’ for SMB cybersecurity

Summary

Small and medium businesses are the newest targets for cybersecurity attacks, with 1 in 3 breached last year. SMBs are becoming more proactive in detecting and stopping these threats, and today a startup called Cynomi is announcing $37 million in funding to meet that demand. Insight Partners and Entrée Capital are co-leading the round, with previous backers Canaan, Flint Capital, and S16VC also participating. Cynomi previously raised around $23 million (including this seed round we covered in 2022). We understand from sources close to the deal that the valuation post-money is more than $140 million. London and Tel Aviv-based Cynomi was founded by CEO David Primor, a PhD who previously was the CTO and head of R&D of the Israeli Defense Forces; and COO Roy Azoulay, whose experience spans being a founder (his last company was one of the big innovators in deepfake detection) and a spotter of other founders (he started and led the first startup incubator at Oxford University, making a big return when an early portco, Onfido, sold for a big return). Their combined cyber and market-timing experience is playing out in an interesting way in this latest venture. Cynomi leans, at a basic level, into the trend of using AI-based agents and copilots to do complicated and high-volume work, but it’s also pushing the boundaries of what we might expect those AIs to do. CEO Primor describes Cynomi’s product not as a copilot but as a “virtual CISO” — an automated, AI-based decision maker helping smaller organizations understand how to run their security operations. Around that, it’s building from the ground up a number of actions and tools that the virtual CISO is capable of carrying out: it can assess a network, plan a set of security policies for the company in question, provide a remediation plan (but not yet remediation itself), track progress around a particular plan, run analytics to determine vulnerabilities across a network, provide recommendations to optimize a system, and the...