Cybersecurity coaching is a kind of issues that everybody has to do however not one thing everybody essentially appears to be like ahead to.
Living Security is an Austin-based startup out to vary cybersecurity coaching one thing you sit up for, not dread. And the corporate has simply closed on a $14 million Series B to proceed its enlargement past cybersecurity consciousness coaching into human risk management.
Washington, D.C. based-Updata Partners led the financing, which additionally included participation from current backers earlier traders Silverton Partners, Active Capital, Rain Capital and SaaS Venture Partners. The funding comes after $5 million collection A, led by Austin-based Silverton, raised final April.
Husband and spouse Drew and Ashley Rose based Living Security out of their home in June 2017 with the mission of creating cybersecurity coaching much less boring and more practical by way of gamified studying with dwell motion immersive storylines, role-based micro modules and reporting.
Living Security launched with its flagship product — Cyber Escape Room. When the pandemic hit, the startup introduced its in-person coaching periods on-line via the launch of CyberEscape Online.
With extra folks working remotely, the necessity for the kind of providing Living Security supplies has turn into much more paramount, contemplating how many individuals use private gadgets for skilled causes, amongst different issues. Employees are extra weak than ever to inadvertently offering entry factors into the networks of the enterprises the place they work — whether or not via social engineering, phishing or different strategies.
Today, Living Security works with over 100 giant enterprises to coach their international workforces to raised shield delicate knowledge and safe their organizations. The startup’s buyer checklist is spectacular, and contains giant enterprises equivalent to CVS Health, Mastercard, Verizon, MassMutual, Biogen, AmerisourceBergen, Hewlett Packard, JPMorgan and Target.
So it’s not a giant shock that in 2020, Living Security tripled its income and worker headcount and greater than doubled its buyer depend. The firm declined to offer onerous income figures, saying solely that ARR grew almost 200% final 12 months.
“We have seen a significant increase in account growth and expansion in existing accounts..largely in part due to the scalability of our digital solution,” CEO Ashley Rose mentioned.
With the success of its escape rooms and gamified coaching, Living Security’s workforce then requested themselves how they might make their efforts “more predictable.”
“We added risk management and scoring so program and security owners could become more targeted and focused on the delivery of their training,” Rose mentioned.
So now Living Security goals to make use of behavioral knowledge and analytics to measure and handle human risk. It plans to take that knowledge and supply “predictive interventions” to workers.
“We’re centered on ‘How do we turn people from our greatest risk, to our greatest assets in cybersecurity?” Rose said. “That’s our huge imaginative and prescient for the corporate.”
Image Credits: Living Security
With its “Unify” human risk management platform, Living Security needs to offer an much more scalable resolution. The firm additionally plans to make use of its new capital towards increasing its geographic attain and scaling each direct and channel gross sales efforts.
Currently, Living Security has 55 workers with the objective of getting 90 by 12 months’s finish.
Deb Walter, director of data safety coaching and consciousness at AmerisourceBergen, mentioned she first engaged with Living Security in 2017 when she requested its CyberSecurity Card sport.
“I wanted to gamify how I presented training,” she remembers.
Introducing episodic gamification and its “bingeable” content material into her coaching program was a giant hit with workers, based on Walter.
“Their new platform is enabling us to deploy an ‘Information security academy’ to encourage associates and contractors to use several modes of training to earn points and track themselves on a leaderboard,” she mentioned.
Updata General Partner Jon Seeber, who’s taking a seat on Living Security’s board with the funding, mentioned his agency noticed “breakout potential” within the startup’s platform.
“It comes as close as you can to closing the loop between people and the systems on which they’re operating,” he mentioned.
Plus, he mentioned, it does it in a approach that avoids the compliance-focused, “check-the-box” mindset that so usually dominates employee-focused cybersecurity options.
