Rixk I/O CEO Karim Toubba

Security software startup Risk I/O today announced that it has raised an additional $4 million as part of its Series A financing round, bringing the company’s total capital raised to date to $10.5 million. The startup also today announced that it has named Silicon Valley security veteran Karim Toubba as its new CEO.

Current investors U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), Tugboat Ventures and Hyde Park Angels participated in the financing round which was led by existing investor Costanoa Venture Capital, an early-stage investor in cloud-based services that leverage data and analytics. “We look for companies that are building data-driven applications using machine learning and predictive analytics to tackle a significant technical or business problem, and Risk I/O is a great example of that kind of company,” said Neill Occhiogrosso, Partner at Costanoa, in a statement. As part of the deal, Occhiogrosso will join Risk I/O’s board of directors.

Risk I/O said it will use the new funding to expand sales and marketing efforts to meet demand from organizations that require better visibility into where they are most susceptible to cyber-attack. Risk I/O is a vulnerability threat management platform that correlates Internet attack data against an organization’s vulnerabilities to produce a list of prioritized vulnerabilities to fix. The company claims its platform processes over 2.5 billion security vulnerabilities a day against Internet breach data for its users. “Security is one of the biggest generators of data in the enterprise,” said new CEO Toubba in a statement. “It would take 475,000 security analysts to process as much security data as Risk I/O does in a single day.”

Karim Toubba, CEO of Risk I/O, via LinkedIn

Toubba was most recently vice president of global security channels at Juniper Networks, Inc.. Explaining his decision to join the Chicago-based startup, Toubba said he wanted to run a business that was solving a significant problem. “My biggest concern about security is all the noise about things the security vendors are attempting to claim they solve,” Toubba told Crain’s Chicago Business.

Startup helped along by hacking increase

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Risk I/O was founded four years ago (as HoneyApps) by Ed Bellis, who said the company has quadrupled revenue since then. “We’ve gotten beyond that critical product-market fit stage, and it’s about being able to scale this,” he told Crain’s. “My focus will be on product, the technology.”

Risk I/O said it is gaining momentum in light of the recent increase in hacking and other cyber attacks as well as its partnerships with threat intelligence providers including 6Scan, Ltd., AlienVault, Inc., VeriSign, Inc. The company also this year announced an integration with Dell SecureWorks.

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Photo credit: cptiii via photopin cc

Headshot of Karim Toubba, CEO of Risk I/O, via LinkedIn