Tracebit, a cloud threat detection and deception platform, has raised a £3.9 million seed funding round.
Accel led the round, with participation from Tapestry VC along with angel investors including Guy Podjarny (founder of Snyk), Tim Sadler and Ed Bishop (Tessian Founders), Mandy Andress (CISO of Elastic) and 20SALES.
For more than 30 years, cybersecurity professionals have been developing ‘threat deception’ techniques to detect attacks, learn about their behaviours, and expose the vulnerabilities in their defences.
These involve the creation of fake ‘honeypots’ or ‘canary’ resources to draw in malicious actors and catch them in the act.
Threat deception is one of the most powerful layers of defence available to enterprises, and research has shown that attackers are less effective and move more slowly when they know canaries are present in a system.
However, high levels of cost and complexity have meant this technique still remains the preserve of the top 1% of security teams. Tracebit’s threat deception platform opens up access to threat deception techniques for thousands of cloud-based systems.
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Tracebit uses cloud-native APIs to create tailored canaries across cloud networks to lure out threats in as little as 30 minutes, without hardware. It currently protects over 250 cloud accounts with 1,500 cloud canary resources, processing over 2.4 billion security events per week.
Co-founders Andy Smith (CEO) and Sam Cox (CTO) founded the company in 2023 after spending five years growing the engineering team at UK cybersecurity startup Tessian, acquired by Proofpoint in 2023.
“Our mission at Tracebit is to accelerate the mass adoption of threat deception for enterprises everywhere, and to reduce the mean time for detecting an intruder from months to minutes,” said Smith.
“Honeypots are one of the biggest deterrents to cyber attacks, but have been underused for too long due to their cost and complexity. This funding will help us bring threat deception to enterprises that haven’t felt able to leverage it before.”
Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, said: “Having worked with Andy and Sam during Accel’s partnership with Tessian, I knew first-hand that they’re not only experienced technologists, but also have strong commercial instincts.
“The Tracebit team’s cloud-native approach to threat deception and focus on modern DevOps tools and practices has already gained impressive early traction with customers and I’m excited about partnering with the team again on this new journey.”