Cybersecurity AI provider Auguria emerges from stealth to solve security operations data overload and cost problems

Auguria announces its formal entrance into the cybersecurity AI space with seed round funding from SYN Ventures and SentinelOne's S Ventures. Auguria drives the transformation of traditional security operations by encoding generations worth of hard-won human security experience into artificial intelligence (AI) models capable of cutting through a sea of multi-vendor event data.

LADERA RANCH, Calif., March 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Auguria, Inc., a cybersecurity artificial intelligence company, is pleased to announce its emergence from stealth mode after two plus years of software platform development. With an initial investment from SYN Ventures Seed Fund, Auguria is driving the transformation of traditional security operations by optimizing data for human and AI consumption with the industry's first vector-based cybersecurity platform for security operations data integration, transformation and analytics. Auguria's Security Knowledge Layer™, or Auguria SKL™ leverages the latest developments in AI automation techniques to transform, classify, and prioritize massive parallel streams of events, logs, and telemetry produced by technology security infrastructures.

"Companies worldwide are struggling under the weight of millions to billions of security events that their infrastructures are producing. CISOs and their teams often do not know if they are compromised by adversaries because the meaningful clues these systems produce are difficult to isolate and interpret," says Dan Burns, Auguria Board Member and Committee Chairman at SYN Ventures Seed Fund. Burns should know. As CEO and Co-founder of Optiv, which he created in 2015 with the merger of Accuvant and Fishnet Security, he's been a trusted advisor to thousands of firms who've been in this exact situation. Burns expands by saying, "SYN is pitched by multiple companies every week, especially with AI-based ideas, but what stood out about Auguria was how they are cleverly applying AI to solve an enormous problem, that is, data overload, situational awareness, and the cost of data storage."

Auguria is ushering in a new era of cybersecurity where AI understands and automatically adapts to each organization's unique needs. Auguria SKL creates the foundation for AI-driven SecOps, acting as the connective layer between SIEM and data lakes, rich security data sources such as XDR, and language models like copilots and AI assistants. Auguria is unleashing the potential of human-machine teaming for security operations to finally solve the critical challenge of data overload.

Ryan Permeh, Board Observer and Operating Partner & Investor at SYN Ventures, comments on what attracted him to this investment. "Organizations are often on the backfoot as adversaries relentlessly attack. One mitigation effort is to send every bit of telemetry to expensive SIEM analytic platforms with the hope that staff can stop maliciousness before it has a chance to do damage. This isn't working so well anymore because the volume of data needing analysis with the human interpretive touch is in the stratosphere." Permeh, former Chief Scientist at McAfee and co-founder of Cylance, acknowledges that something has to change. "Auguria has figured out a way to eliminate 99% of the noise from event data so that SecOps teams can focus with a high degree of confidence and that the remaining 1% is indeed interesting and actionable. Their SKL platform is highly effective at revealing what was previously unknown in the environment which is a holy grail for threat hunters."

SentinelOne's S Ventures is also an Auguria seed round investor. Shlomi Salem, S Venture's CTO comments, "Amidst data deluge, a significant challenge emerges: distinguishing data related to genuine threats from the multitude of benign noise. This task is not only complex but also critical for effective threat detection and response. Consequently, many organizations opt to retain all gathered data, erring on the side of caution. This approach, however, leads to a substantial increase in SIEM costs." Salem goes on to add, "To mitigate these burgeoning SIEM expenses, a practical strategy involves the meticulous identification and elimination of duplicate, repetitive data, followed by the strategic categorization of the remaining data based on its necessity for either immediate investigation or long-term storage for forensic and compliance purposes. Auguria makes identification of anomalous activity extremely easy while simultaneously unburdening security analysts. And also diverting uninteresting telemetry to storage that is less expensive."

Chris Coulter, Auguria CTO and Co-Founder says, "The giant challenge security teams face today is too much data and too little time. Analytical tools have not kept pace with the ever growing complexity of data. As a result, security teams often develop all sorts of hightouch manual workarounds and often with repurposed tools usually designed for something else. Every security team I speak with says the same thing. They want modern data analysis solutions tailored specifically for security practitioners. This is exactly why we started Auguria. Our methods streamline and automate the entire process, from data ingestion to analysis, to enrichment and prioritization so that analysts can go directly to the step of responding to an incident versus spending vast amounts of time sorting, filtering, and triaging billions of data points. We're super excited that Auguria is already making people's heads turn."

The benefits of the AI automation to SecOps teams are numerous. When processed through the Auguria SKL, data is "de-noised" which is to say AI processes it and determines what is "normal" and therefore of no risk. The data that remains is the proverbial needle in a haystack. By accurately classifying and setting to the side everything that is normal, what comes into focus are the previously unknown tactics and techniques that adversaries are constantly iterating upon. All of this is mapped into a visual ontology to give even greater context. Customers can also send Auguria SKL enriched data back to their analytic platforms so that questions like "show me everything related to the accounting network where Auguria thinks the event is abnormal."

Keith Palumbo, Auguria CEO and Co-Founder says this, "We are thrilled to have the trust of our investors SYN Ventures and S Ventures as we introduce this new technology to the market. We are confident that customers that give us a look will see that we really can help them accelerate and modernize their SIEM operations by feeding in actionable and prioritized data that analysts can managebly act upon while at the same time giving them the option to divert run-of-the-mill, non-controversial events to less expensive storage."

About Auguria

Auguria is driving the transformation of traditional security operations by optimizing data for human and AI consumption with the industry's first vector-based cybersecurity platform for security operations data integration, transformation and analytics

Follow Auguria on linkedin.com/company/auguria-io/ or go to auguria.io for more information.

About SYN Ventures

SYN Ventures (SYN) is a venture capital firm focused on investing in disruptive and innovative security companies in the cybersecurity, industrial security, national defense, privacy, regulatory compliance, and data governance industries. Learn more at synventures.com.

About S Ventures

S Ventures, is the venture capital arm of SentinelOne (NYSE:S). SentinelOne's mission is to defeat every attack, every second, of every day. Learn more at sentinelone.com.

SOURCE Auguria, Inc.