Morphisec Ltd., a cybersecurity startup with offices in the U.S. and Israel, today said that it has nabbed $31 million in fresh funding to support expansion initiatives.

The startup employs a method it calls moving target defense to hide weak points in a company’s systems that hackers could potentially use to carry out breaches. 

Morphisec provides the technology in a pair of software products, Morphisec Guard and Morphisec Keep, that help secure employee devices and backend applications, respectively. Both are designed for midsized companies. Morphisec’s value proposition for such firms is that its products don’t require a large cybersecurity team to operate, which the startup says makes them more accessible than many competing tools that were built with large enterprises in mind.

In a typical hacking campaign, cybercriminals identify an application that has a vulnerable component and compromise it with malicious code. To know where to inject the malicious code, hackers must learn the precise location of the component in the memory of the system on which it’s running. Morphisec’s moving target defense approach blocks breach attempts by mixing up memory locations, which renders the malicious code harmless.  

The startup’s technology relocates application code components such as functions, variables and libraries every time a workload is loaded so hackers can’t predict where a given component might land. For added measure, it leaves behind a decoy copy of the original application. The decoy serves as a kind of sensor, helping to detect attempts made by hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the workload.  

The startup says that its products run on more than 7 million devices worldwide across more than 5,000 organizations. For those customers, Morphisec claims to be blocking north of 15,000 cyberattacks every day. 

With the new $31 million from investors, the startup plans to expand the size of its teams in the U.S. and Israel. The round was led by JVP with participation from multiple existing investors, including French telecommunications giant Orange S.A. and Deutsche Telekom AG’s venture capital arm.

The startup and its investors see a big opportunity in the midmarket. “Midsized enterprises are historically underserved by the cybersecurity market and left behind by cost-prohibitive tools and staff constraints,” said Morphisec Chief Executive Officer Ronen Yehoshua.

Other security startups have identified the opportunity as well. Cyware Labs Inc., which provides a so-called cyber fusion platform that helps companies spot and respond to threats, last year introduced a new version of its software specifically aimed at the midmarket. The startup said at the time it sees a “large market gap” not addressed by traditional solutions that are mainly aimed at big organizations. 

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