Acclaimed Startup Halcyon Enters New Round Of Funding

Ransomware continues to be one of the most devastating forms of cyberattacks. It’s a lose-lose. Whether or not you choose to pay the ransom, the downtime you experience is going to hurt. IT security providers need solutions that are just as innovative as their attackers. Jon Miller, CEO of Halcyon and Chris Catanzaro, VP of Global MSSP & Channels for Halcyon spoke with CRNtv’s Jon Alba to discuss how the company’s newest round of funding could result in game changing solutions.

Jon Alba: What need did you see that established security providers were not doing at the time?

Jon Miller: At the time, my co-founder and I had a company where we were working on cyber offense for the US government. We were very much at the cutting edge of evasion technology, APT kind of style threats. And what we saw was essentially an aging technology stack. When you look at the leaders in kind of the end point space, they're all 10, 12-year-plus technology. While they're very mature and they have a lot of features, they do have a lot of limitations too.

And what we saw was that the attackers figured out those limitations and were starting to exploit them, coming in, disabling an EDR and then carrying out an attack, right? Where historically it used to be about companies lacking security hygiene and then that resulting in a compromise, in present day you can have a fully mature, well-run stack and still fall victim to these ransomware attacks.

Jon Alba: What kind of exciting news can you share with us?

Jon Miller: We recently just closed a rather large, sizeable growth investment round which brought Halcyon to unicorn status. Which is rare for a security company in this market, let alone a security company as young as ours. But it's truly been the channel and our partners that have enabled this kind of explosive growth we've had in the last two and a half years.

Jon Alba: With that announcement, Chris, what should established partners expect in the coming months and why should new partners be excited about this?

Chris: We're going to take a sizable part of that investment and reinvest that in our partner community. We already started building some new plumbing for the partners with the brand-new partner portal. But we look at it in three distinct go-to-markets for us when it comes to the channel ecosystem.

First is, our VAR partners are normal. I added resellers, so a whole bunch of training [is] coming out for them. A lot more support, a lot more marketing events, things like that where we can do the demand generation and get in front of all these potential customers.

[The] second thing is in the MSSP market, a very viable go-to-market for us, where we have a very robust platform that supports that multi-tenant go-to-market. And so, we will be taking much more out through the MSSP aggregators. We're launching on Pax8 here in December, so that will be exciting and great for all our MSSP partners.

And then the most important one of all of them is really our insurance channel. There's a whole lot that we can do with insurance, cyber insurance providers. We can really reduce their risk, so they don't have to pay out so much. And in turn, we can get our customers better rates and more coverage for the same amount of money, those types of things. So, we'll be investing quite a bit in that insurance channel.

Jon Miller: We're committed to always being a channel-only company, right? And whatever we can do to help protect customers against ransomware, I think you'll continue to see Halcyon at the forefront of it. We're committed to staying on topic and coming out with new innovative features that nobody else has that essentially mitigate the business risk of ransomware to our customers.

If you are interested in how Halcyon can help protect against ransomware or just want to learn about becoming a partner, visit Halcyon.ai.