Attack surfaces continue to grow as enterprises widen their digital footprint and AI goes mainstream into various aspects of the business. Meanwhile, CISOs and CIOs continue to struggle with their defenses – they all want their security operations centers (SOC) to be more efficacious, productive, and scalable.
A few years back, some of us were at F5 and Palo Alto Networks defending mission-critical applications and cloud services for global banks, major social media networks, and video collaboration platforms. We saw advanced cyber threats — from nation-states to organized crime — constantly probing our customer's’ defenses. Meeting strict 24x7x365 SLAs with limited talent was an uphill battle and our SOC teams worked tirelessly. No matter how good we got, it felt like we were always reacting, never truly getting ahead.
Simultaneously, other members of our founding team were at Google pioneering large language models (LLMs).Their main focus was on improving the quality and consistency of output from these frontier models. AI showed massive promise to automate human work, but suffered from a few inherent flaws — long-short term memory, consistency of reasoning, cost of analyzing a very large data set, etc.
Together, we reached the same conclusion that the problems of security and operations cannot be solved by hiring more people or building a bigger foundation model or a smaller security-specific model — the solution will require grounds-up re-thinking!
The magical combination: Humans + Bots
We founded Exaforce with a singular goal: 10X speed-up for tasks done by humans. And nowhere is this work more complex than in enterprise security and operations. We have made great strides towards this goal using our task-specific AI agents called “Exabots” and advanced data exploration. We think of this platform as an Agentic SOC Platform. Our goal with Exabots from conception has been to help automate difficult tasks, not the simple or low-skill tasks that you see in demos.
For the last 18 months, we have been working with our design partners to train Exabots to help SOC analysts, detection engineers, and threat hunters. Exabots augment them to auto-triage alerts, detect breaches in critical cloud services, and simplify the process of threat hunting. We are seeing up to 60X speed-up in day-to-day tasks alongside dramatic improvement in efficacy and auditability.
Our light-bulb moment: Multi-Model AI Engine
Our ex-Google team knew from day one that no foundation model will be able to deliver consistency of reasoning needed for human-grade analysis of threat alerts or do the analysis of all runtime events while meeting the cost points needed to detect breaches. As a result, we had to innovate on a brand new approach by building a new multi-model AI engine that combines three different types of AI models that we have been developing for the last 18 months:
- Semantic Model: imbibes human-grade understanding of runtime events/logs, cloud configuration, code, identity data, and threat feeds.
- Behavioral Model: that learns patterns of actions, applications, data, resources, identities (humans and machines), locations, etc.
- Knowledge Model: LLM that performs reasoning on this data, executes dynamically generated workflows, analyzes historical tickets in ITSM (eg. Jira, ServiceNow).
Together, these models work in perfect harmony to overcome the inherent flaws of a LLM-only approach (long-short term memory, consistency of reasoning, cost of reasoning over a very large data set). This AI engine can analyze all the data at cost points that are unmatched in the industry and yet deliver human-grade analysis!
Backed by leading investors: $75 Million in Series A
Today, we’re thrilled to announce $75 million in Series A funding, led by Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, alongside Thomvest, Touring Capital, and others who share our belief in augmenting today’s hard working cyber professionals with AI that works consistently and reliably!
This investment allows us to scale our investment in R&D to refine our multi-model AI engine, train Exabots to perform more and more complex tasks, and onboard more design partners eager to see how an agentic SOC can transform their security operations.
A glimpse into the future of SOC
With Exaforce, our design partners are already seeing multitude of benefits for their SOC teams:
- Higher Efficacy: much higher consistency and quality in investigation of complex threats than their existing in-house SOC or external partners (MSSP and MDR)
- Better Productivity: much faster in detecting and responding to complex threats to their cloud services compared to existing SIEMs/CDR solutions.
- Cheaper to scale: automated handling of challenging and tedious tasks (data collection, analysis, user and manager confirmations, ticket analysis, etc) along with the ability to scale defense on-demand without adding headcount or new contracts with MDR/MSSP
See what the Wall Street Journal has to say about our funding!
What’s next
Though we’re very excited about launching the company, our journey is just beginning! We’ll continue collaborating with more design partners to expand coverage, refine AI workflows, and ensure that humans always remain in control. Our goal is to build a SOC where AI handles the busywork and humans focus on true threats — creating a security environment that is truly more consistent in results, faster in response, and lower in TCO.
If you want a SOC that is composed of superhuman analysts, detection engineers, or threat hunters - request a demo to learn more. Together, we can build the future of the SOC!
