Cybersecurity startup Halcyon Tech Inc. today announced that it had raised $40 million in new funding to expand the company’s engineering, research and development and sales functions.

Founded in 2020, Halcyon offers multilayered prevention and endpoint resilience with automated encryption key material capture and autonomous decryption capabilities. The platform is designed to give organizations peace of mind, knowing their valuable data and systems are safeguarded.

With a mission to defeat ransomware, the company argues that modern defensive cyber solutions have failed in the face of cheap and easy-to-create ransomware. Halcyon’s solution is designed to defeat ransomware with tools that prevent initial intrusion, disrupt attacks in progress and immediately reverse the effects of ransomware in the event of a successful attack.

The platform takes a multitiered approach to defeat ransomware, including pre-execution ransomware prevention that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning engines to detect and block any known bad executables, such as off-the-shelf commodity ransomware. The platform passes unknown but suspicious executables to the additional protection layers for further analysis.

Should ransomware manage to get through defenses, the Halcyon platform tricks ransomware into aborting or revealing the attack by exploiting features hardcoded in the ransomware, triggering rulesets via deception techniques to prevent payload detonation.

The platform also offers endpoint and network resiliency with automated host isolation capabilities that prevent ransomware from spreading to other endpoints. Automated encryption key capture and decryption of any impacted assets is said to eliminate the need to pay a ransom and reduce recovery time from days to minutes.

Bain Capital Ventures LLC led the Series B round. BCV Partner and former Symantec Chief Executive Officer Enrique Salem will join the board and BCV Partner Jeff Williams will join Halcyon as chief revenue officer. Including the new funding, Halcyon has raised $90 million in 2023, including a round of $50 million in April.

“Too many organizations are simply adapting their endpoint products and applying them to the ransomware fight,” Halcyon co-founder and CEO Jon Miller said ahead of the announcement. “This lack of purpose-built tooling is enabling ransomware’s unimpeded growth. This investment validates the impact Halcyon has had in combating ransomware and is proof-positive that ransomware is top of mind to leadership across industries today.”

In September, Kris Lamb, chief product officer at Halcyon, spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s live streaming studio, where he discussed how battling ransomware means employing a mindset that failure is inevitable:

Image: Halcyon