Cyberattack crisis readiness and management startup Cytactic Cyber Management Ltd. said today it has closed on a $16 million seed funding round led by the cybersecurity software-focused venture capital firm Evolution Equity Partners.

The startup has created a software platform that enables companies to prepare themselves to deal with potentially devastating cyberattacks that can take their entire business offline, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Cytactic believes there is a growing desire among enterprises to ensure they are ready to deal with anything hackers can throw at them. But many organizations are still woefully underprepared for such incidents, and can benefit from a more unified approach to “cyber-readiness” that integrates crisis preparation, response management and recovery processes.

To meet this need, Cytactic has created what is says is an innovative software-as-a-service platform that consolidates those capabilities to provide companies with a simplified and orchestrated, step-by-step methodology for dealing with any cyber crisis.

Its platform can be customized to different business profiles and risk landscapes, and integrates artificial intelligence technologies to both plan and implement responses to various threat scenarios. The integrated AI models perform predictive assessments that inform its decision support tools.

That enables it to offer immediate recommendations based on the real-time insights into any kind of cyberattack. The platform also features an AI-powered copilot that can automate many aspects of an organization’s cyber response plans, to ensure they are implemented immediately and thwart the attackers’ intentions.

Evolution Equity Partners’ Yuval Ben-Itzhak said Cytactic’s platform goes beyond mitigating the threat of cyberattacks, since it can also help to prepare and train business leaders, while ensuring organizations are compliant with their industry’s evolving regulatory requirements and insurer demands.

“The increasing complexity in preparing for, managing, and recovering from a cyber incident has become more painful and difficult to overcome than ever before,” Ben-Itzhak said. “It is no longer enough to know how to technically investigate and respond to a crisis with an incident response team. Cross-organizational action involving multiple stakeholders is required, making managing and navigating crises successfully even more difficult.”

Cytactic said it created its platform as a response to the devastating financial losses inflicted on organizations that have fallen victim to cyberattacks in recent years. It cites data from Gartner Inc. that shows how such attacks are only likely to accelerate in the coming years. The analyst firm said in a report this year that 75% of information technology companies will have to deal with a ransomware attack in 2025. Those threats cannot be taken lightly, with the average data breach costing $8.46 million in 2023, the report revealed.

Because of the rise in cybersecurity incidents, many governments, including the U.S., have elected to create more strict regulations that force companies to step up their cyber readiness. Moreover, many companies are looking into cyberattack insurance policies to protect themselves against these kinds of incidents. But those policies mandate a certain level of cyber readiness, hence the need for a platform like Cytactic’s.

The startup argues that a cyber crisis is one of the biggest challenges any business will face because of the chaos that often results from a crippling cyberattack. Such incidents tend to result in poor synchronization among stakeholders, inadequate information flow, complex decision-making processes amid lots of uncertainty, a lack of situational awareness and more. Due to this chaos, the damage caused by cyberattacks can quickly multiply.

Cytactic says early preparedness through the implementation of management and control systems is therefore essential to mitigate the dangers of cyberattacks and help organizations to get their businesses back on track in the shortest possible time frame.

Once again, the startup cites Gartner, which says in another study that “conducting incident response planning and having a formal, third-party contingency plan increased third-party cyber risk management effectiveness by 42%.”

Cytactic founder and Chief Executive Nimrod Kozlovski said his company has already seen “strong demand” for its platform. “This investment will enable us to scale globally and expand our network of strong professional partnerships,” he added.

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