Cybersecurity startup Safe Security raises $70 million from Avataar Ventures, others
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Cybersecurity intelligence startup Safe Security has raised $70 million in a funding round led by Avataar Ventures , with participation from Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, NextEquity Partners and Prosperity7 Ventures.Existing investors, including Eight Roads, John Chambers, and Sorenson Capital, also participated in the round.The Palo Alto-based company said the fresh capital will be used to invest in research and development initiatives, strengthen its presence in the cyber-risk management space, and develop agentic AI-based reasoning models as it works toward building cyberAGI, artificial general intelligence designed to manage cybersecurity autonomously.Founded in 2012 by Saket Modi, Viditkumar Baxi and Rahul Tyagi, Safe Security helps large enterprises measure and manage their cyber risks in real-time using artificial intelligence (AI).The company's software continuously assesses an organisation's internal systems and third-party partners, quantifies how exposed an organisation is to potential cyber threats, simulates the impact of possible breaches, and recommends where companies should focus their security efforts.'We are the layer of intelligence on top of pretty much the entire cyber security stack of a company, which translates tactical findings into business risk and then enables action on that,' Modi, who is the chief executive officer, told ET.Modi added that the company, which was incubated at IIT Bombay, offers over 100 application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrate with commonly used enterprise security tools.Safe Security was bootstrapped for its first four years. Modi, a computer science engineer, and his team were also involved in the security assessment of Bhim, the digital payments app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).The company recently launched a new product in the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) space, which it claims is the first fully autonomous solution in the category. It said that unlike existing tools that rely on static risk scores, Safe's version uses dozens of AI agents to scan an organisation's attack surface in real-time and simulate how adversaries might exploit different vulnerabilities.Safe Security currently has around 200 employees, with its research and development team of 100 based in India. It counts companies such as Google, Netflix, Fidelity, Victoria's Secret, T-Mobile, and Chevron among its clients.In 2023, Safe Security raised $50 million in a round led by Sorenson Capital. With the latest fundraise, the company has now raised a total of $170 million.'Most cybersecurity sub-sectors we've evaluated are either overcrowded or limited to tactical, widget-like solutions. But cybersecurity today is a boardroom and CEO-level priority, and that's not changing anytime soon,' said Nishant Rao, founding partner at Avataar Ventures. 'What makes Safe stand out is its positioning — not as another detection tool, but as a strategic intelligence layer across the entire cybersecurity stack.'
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