Israeli cyber security firm OPORA announced seed funding of $7 million led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and private angel investors on Thursday.
OPORA was founded in 2018 by Yuval Diskin, the former head of Israel’s Internal Security Agency (Shin Bet), along with former senior ISA figures Noam Jolles and Tsafrir Kats, and with San Francisco based CEO, Chris Bell, formerly co-founder and COO of Securonix.
The company uses the industry’s first pre-attack adversary behavior analytics capability to deliver pre-emptive adversary threat protection against the most persistent, organized, and largely uncontested cyber criminals operating today.
“We started OPORA because we realized that to get control over cybersecurity and the largely uncontested adversaries behind the chaos, IT Security teams need a preemptive advantage,” said CEO Chris Bell. “OPORA customers change the balance of power between them and their adversaries, gaining a pre-emptive advantage that translates into adversary level prevention, containment, and control.”
The cyber security firm raised $2 million dollars in seed capital in May of 2019 through a private investor and has been operating in stealth mode for the last 18 months developing its technology and proving it out with customers in Germany, the UK and the US across the banking, utility, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical sectors.
OPORA's Adversary Threat Protection "ATP" platform provides a real-time and continuous view of customers’ cyber adversaries, exposing and monitoring their network of attack infrastructure, and delivering pre-emptive action to prevent attacks at the source.
Organizations today manage cyber security threats without an actionable view of their adversaries, leaving them in a chaotic defensive state. The OPORA ATP solution sits between the organization and its adversaries as a new first line of defense, monitoring adversary activity and translating it into pre-emptive threat containment actions for existing prevention, detection and response systems.
As such, OPORA acts like an “adversary firewall” for the organization by enabling the pre-emptive blocking of adversary attacks days in advance of an initial campaign and later on throughout the attack chain.
The firm’s “pre-emptive security” approach was conceived by Yuval Diskin, during his time with the Shin Bet, where it was successful in preventing terror attacks ahead of time.
“It is time to move from defense to offense and track cybercriminals in their territory before they move to attack” said JVP Founder & Chairman Erel Margalit.
“Israel has brought the three big cyber paradigms to the world. The first, firewalls created by Checkpoint Software, the second being Cyberark’s solution, preventing attackers from within, and now the third, OPORA’s technology is stopping criminals on their home turf before they even attack. Opora has brought about a new mindset in which cybersecurity is moving from defense to offense," he added.