IoT Security Provider Viakoo Raises $ 10 Million

Mountain View, California Viakoo, a company that automates IoT security for businesses, today announced that it has raised $ 10 million in a Series A funding round led by Shasta Ventures and existing investors Stanley Black & Decker , PivotNorth Capital and Blue Fog Capital.

As the number of IoT devices continues to increase in the home and office, organizations have become more savvy about their security and protecting their critical data. The point is, when you have thousands of devices to manage, coming from different vendors and spread across multiple sites, at an organization level, it’s very difficult to quantify and fix vulnerabilities. CISOs have long struggled with this problem because manual correction is often the solution, and it is not very cheap.

This is where Viakoo comes in. Founded in 2013, the company says it eliminates the need to manually manage device security with its agentless software solution called Viakoo Action. The platform automatically discovers, monitors and remediates vulnerabilities for businesses of all sizes.

Fix vulnerabilities with Viakoo

“Viakoo Action automatically collects and analyzes data from IoT devices, including the applications to which the IoT devices are connected, provides an integrated data model and a single dashboard summary,” Bud Broomhead, CEO of Viakoo, told VentureBeat in an email.

The platform interacts with third-party asset discovery tools like Armis and Forescout to provide a comprehensive view of IoT devices and their compliance status. It then evaluates firmware, password, and 802.1x / TLS certificate status for devices and provides organization-wide firmware updates, certificate deployment and management, and application of the password policy for the remediation of vulnerabilities and the continuation of operations.

The whole thing works as a one-click solution that fixes different types of devices almost instantly and on a massive scale, the company says on its website.

“In addition, Viakoo [also] ensures that IoT devices can be repatriated to full network citizenship [replete with an audit trail] by understanding app dependencies for tightly paired devices, ”said Broomhead. Based in the United States Securing and Phosphorus.io are also active in similar areas, although the CEO of Viakoo claims that they only offer certain features of Viakoo Action.

“Viakoo has competitors who can provide a subset of our capabilities, but no competitor provides the full suite of cyberhygiene and repatriation functions. In particular, Viakoo uniquely supports tightly coupled and loosely coupled IoT devices. Competitors only support weakly coupled, ”he stressed.

Additionally, Broomhead said, Viakoo’s solution can pay for itself within months by preventing targeted attacks on devices. To a certain perspective, most recently, IBM Security revealed that the global average cost to contain a single data breach reached a 17-year high of $ 4.24 million.

Plan ahead

Viakoo plans to deploy new capital to accelerate its sales and expand internationally. The company will also use the funding to expand its executive leadership and to put additional development resources behind Viakoo Action. However, Broomhead hasn’t explained how exactly the platform will evolve in the future.

So far, the company claims to have gained significant influence with large-scale clients including government agencies, healthcare, education service providers, data centers, businesses, and municipal departments. Its total customer base currently stands at over 100.

With the rise of digitization, IoT devices will eventually become a staple for organizations to stay relevant in the industry and open up new business opportunities. From smart cameras providing facility security to thermostats regulating office temperatures, IoT devices can perform a range of critical functions to keep businesses running smoothly.

IDC believes that over 40 billion IoT devices will be operational worldwide by 2025.