As cybersecurity attacks only continue to grow, artificial intelligence-based tools often can deliver fast, automated and analytics-driven responses and insights to help companies keep up and better protect themselves and their users. But mid-sized and smaller businesses may not perceive themselves as having big enough budgets, skilled enough workforces or even enough executive vision to adopt AI-based tools.
Coro is looking to change those perceptions with an AI-based cybersecurity solution that it is making available to mid-market and smaller businesses through a subscription model. The Israel-based company with U.S. offices in New York and Chicago this week announced a $60 million Series C round of financing, bringing it to a total of $80 million raised in the past six months. U.K.-based Balderton Capital led the round, with additional participation from existing investor Jerusalem Venture Partners.
The company said the funds will be used to further accelerate company growth on top of the 300% year-over-year growth Coro has seen for each of the past three years and into 2022, a time frame that coincides with Coro’s shift away from consumer solutions and into mid-sized and small businesses. In particular, the company wants to expand globally to triple its number of employees, with an emphasis on its Chicago operations.
It may have work to do convincing smaller business customers that they need and can afford AI-based security solutions, but Coro thinks it will be an easy sell. Company officials told Fierce Electronics by email that it delivers the value of an AI platform in a simple and affordable package.
“The beauty of the platform is that it is not perceived as sophisticated at all. It is exceptionally simple,” Coro said in the email. “Underneath the simplicity our customer sees lie incredibly sophisticated engines that they never see or interact with.” About 98% of the security workload for a business can be handled by automated AI processes so that any IT staffers–to the degree that they may or may not exist in many smaller businesses–don’t need to manage system complexities.
Coro said businesses adopting its platform won’t need their own cybersecurity teams and that they will no longer have to rely on legacy point-oriented solutions like anti-malware or anti-phishing software. Instead, the AI platform addresses cybersecurity protection across all users, devices, networks, cloud services and email, the company said.
Moreover, Coro is making its platform available in a software-as-a-service subscription model that will cost businesses about $7 per user per month. “They are less concerned about the underlying technology as long as we can prove that it works, which we do during the two-week free trial period,” Coro said.
The timing is critical for mid-sized and small businesses to adopt better cybersecurity tools. Ponemon Institute said in a study in late 2019 that 66% of SMB organizations worldwide had reported a security attack in the previous 12 months, and Coro’s own recent research suggested that 70% of cyber attacks target mid-market and small business segments. The same research also indicated that in 2022 a mid-market company with 1,000 employees could face between five and seven attack per employee per month, translating to more than 56,000 attacks in a year.
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