Defendify raises $2M in seed money

PORTLAND, Maine—Defendify, an all-in-one SaaS cybersecurity platform developer, announced it closed on $2 million in seed funding, bringing the total raised in the last 18 months to $3.6 million. In that time, Defendify has added thousands of users, doubled its employee count and moved into a larger office space to accommodate the growth.

“We are at about 23 employees now and we hiring a bunch more, so we expect to be at close to 40 by year's end,” Defendify Co-Founder Rob Simopoulos told Security Systems News. “We are investing in sales, marketing, including the addition of a new head of sales and head of marketing to help take the business to the next level. We are also investing heavily in ensuring success for our channel partners, as well as in the development of new technology, which includes making improvements to the Defendify platform itself.”

Existing investor 3dot6 Ventures doubled down and led this round with participation from York IE, Maine Technology Institute (MTI), Maine Venture Fund (MVF), FreshTracks Capital and Wasabi Ventures.

One of the reasons for the company's success is increased awareness of the need for cybersecurity today. According to Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2019, on average, cyberattacks cost companies $200,000.

“Small businesses are now realizing that cybersecurity is something that is a necessity,” Simopoulos pointed out. “They are starting to understand that they need to invest in more than just antivirus software for their computers and firewalls, and that they need to have policies, plans and training in place for their teams on how to identify phishing emails and fraud, for example.”

Interestingly, some of this increased awareness is coming from the customers of these small businesses. “So we have seen a massive uptick in what we call third-party vendor cybersecurity assessments,” he explained. “Within security, providers are getting letters with questionnaires from their top customers asking them what their cybersecurity hygiene looks like. And they are actually starting to not award projects to these companies if they can't check off the right boxes. Defendify helps them to check off those boxes.”

Defendify is also seeing a large uptick in channel partner growth, including recently partnering with PSA to provide cybersecurity solutions to PSA integrators as part of PSA's managed services provider program.

“We continue to invest heavily in our success managers, who help our partners go to market and take Defendify to their customers,” said Simopoulos, who noted that Defendify partners are excited about the opportunity in the marketplace.

“That end user customer, if you have a cybersecurity arm to your business when you come in to talk to them about deploying these physical security devices on their network, they are going to be a heck of a lot more comfortable with you deploying that technology understanding that you have the chops to handle the cybersecurity side,” noted Simopoulos.