U.K.-based “threat deception” startup Tracebit Ltd. said today it has closed on a $5 million seed funding round to enable the mass adoption of a cybersecurity technique that has, until now, strictly been limited to the top 1% of security teams.

Today’s round was led by Accel and saw participation from Tapestry VC, 20Sales and angel investors such as Guy Podjarny, the founder of Snyk Ltd., Tim Sadler and Ed Bishop, the co-founders of Tessian Ltd, and Mandy Andress, chief technology officer of Elastic N.V..

Tracebit has created a cloud-based threat deception platform that enables companies to create so-called “canaries,” which are fake “honeypots” designed to entice hackers into exposing themselves. By creating these canaries, security teams can identify threats within their systems, learn about their behaviors and expose the vulnerabilities in their cyber defenses.

By creating canaries, security teams have a way to draw in malicious actors and catch them in the act. When done correctly, this kind of threat deception technique can be powerful. Tracebit points to research which shows how cyberattacks are much less effective, and move more slowly, when the attacker becomes aware that canaries are present in a compromised system.

Although canaries are effective, they have traditionally been costly and complicated to set up, which means that threat deception techniques are only used by a handful of top-tier enterprises that can afford to throw major resources at such initiatives. The task of scaling threat deception across cloud infrastructures is usually very impractical, as it requires painstaking design, setup and maintenance.

That’s what Tracebit is aiming to change with its dedicated platform for scaling threat deception, paving the way for thousands of companies to start using such methods.

The platform is the first in the industry to use cloud-native application programming interfaces to create ready-made and customized canaries that can be deployed across multiple cloud networks to lure out different kinds of threats. It’s built using what Tracebit describes as a “light-touch” infrastructure, which means companies can set up and switch on threat deception across cloud networks in as little as 30 minutes, without any dedicated hardware.

According to the startup, since launching earlier this year, its platform has already grown to protect more than 250 cloud accounts and more than 1,500 cloud canary resources deployed so far, processing more than 2.4 billion security events each week.

Chris Hymes, chief information security officer at early adopter Riot Games Inc. said his company was one of the first to be able to use Tracebit’s platform to scale deceptive coverage across its cloud computing estates. “The automated platform has enabled us to roll out rapidly and the precise nature of its detections produces low volume, high-value alerts,” he said.

Tracebit was co-founded last year by its Chief Executive Andy Smith and Chief Technology Officer Sam Cox, who previously spent five years working together at the U.K. cybersecurity company Tessian, leaving just before it was acquired by Proofpoint.

Smith said the company’s mission is to enable the mass adoption of threat deception techniques across the enterprise. By doing this, it believes it can reduce the mean time it takes for companies to detect intruders in their systems from months to just minutes.

“Honeypots are one of the biggest deterrents to cyber attacks, but have been underused for too long due to their cost and complexity,” Smith said. “This funding will help us bring threat deception to enterprises that haven’t felt able to leverage it before.”

The company said it’ll use the funds from today’s round to support product development and expand its small engineering team.

Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said he met Smith and Cox while they were still working at Tessian, which his firm had also funded. “I knew first hand that they’re not only experienced technologists, but they also have strong commercial instincts,” he said. “Tracebit’s cloud-native approach to threat deception and its focus on modern DevOps tools and practices has already gained impressive early traction with customers.”

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