Atlanta, Jan.22, 2015: It is a very young comany in the business of security for the Internet of Things (IoT). US-based Bastille, one of the first security companies to detect and mitigate threats from the IoT, announced today that it had extended its angel round with a US $1 million investment, including funding from David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners, a firm that invests in cyber security startups.
The extended angel round will help Bastille fuel engineering and support pilot programs, which include some of the world’s largest financial institutions. Bastille will be formally launching its product at the upcoming RSA Conference in San Francisco, USA this April.
The investment marks the second time that Cowan has backed Bastille’s founder, Chris Rouland. This expansion of the round comes less than five months after Bastille had secured an initial US $1.5 in funding led by prominent cybersecurity investor Tom Noonan and venture capitalist John Huntz; and further underscores the immediate security concerns resulting from the proliferation of the IoT.
A veteran cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur, Rouland founded Bastille in April 2014 to pioneer IoT security through next-generation sensors and software that can monitor new threats in the corporate airspace. This heightened visibility enables enterprise IT security professionals to monitor IoT devices entering their environments, particularly those that connect to wireless communications protocols beyond Wi Fi, such as Zigbee, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, and others. The advanced insight empowers corporations to accurately quantify risk and mitigate 21st century airborne threats that are the unintended consequences of IoT.
Bastille said in a written statement that it saw “a void” in the market for intrusion detection and vulnerability assessment for devices on the IoT. With wearable technology predicted to be a $10 billion dollar industry by 2016, these devices as well as a host of others utilising protocols like Bluetooth, ZigBee and EnOcean will be entering enterprise buildings with insufficient security. Likewise, Bastille is also aiming to protect corporations from malicious devices operating on cellular bands that could be used for unauthorised data collection or to launch attacks on corporate networks.
“There are thousands of manufacturers scrambling to bring IoT devices to market without concern for security or privacy,” said Rouland in a statement. “As these devices begin to infiltrate business environments en masse, new complex and sophisticated threats will frequently evolve, and the responsibility will be on the enterprise to protect their assets and employees from accidentally or maliciously introducing new vectors of compromise.”
Image Credit: Bastille
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