Israeli cybersecurity training firm Cyberbit Ltd. now counts Charlesbank Technology Opportunities Fund as an investor through a $70 million deal announced today.

Charlesbank invested $22 million into the company and also acquired $48 million in existing shares from parent company Elbit Systems Ltd.

Cyberbit plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of its “cyber range” product and grow global sales and marketing to meet what it says is the increasing demand for its product. Founded in 2015, Cyberbit offers a cybersecurity training product suite covering threat protection, incident response and simulated training across information technology, “internet of things” and operations technology.

The company’s cyber range training suite is pitched as ensuring teams have the necessary experience to effectively mitigate an attack. The training is said to provide a dramatic improvement team performance by immersing them in a hyper-realistic cyberattack simulation inside a virtual security operations center before real attacks occur.

Trainees use commercial security tools identical to the tools used at their workplace to detect, investigate and respond to simulated attacks. The training provides performance assessment, feedback and ranking. Results can be used by an organization to quickly identify gaps in their security team’s performance, fix them and ensure their teams are fully prepared when the real attack occurs.

“We’ve realized that our product is ideal for addressing the global cybersecurity skill shortage,” Cyberbit Chief Executive Officer Adi Dar said in a blog post. “Today, numerous leading education institutions are using our cyber range to provide courses that deliver new cybersecurity professionals to the market, helping the industry fill in the increasing number of open positions and addressing unemployment.”

The service is offered both as a cloud service and in on-premises data centers. Cyberbit said that it provides more than 100,000 training sessions annually across five continents. Customers include Fortune 500 companies, leading telecom operators, managed security service providers and system integrators, police departments, governments and militaries.

Cyberbit has now raised approximately $52 million including the new round, having previously raised $30 million in a traditional venture capital round from Claridge Israel in 2018. But the company has operated as a division of Elbit since its founding, so it has had capital put into it by its parent company. With the Charlesbank investment, Elbit no longer owns a majority stake in the company.

Photo: Cyberbit