Shape Security, a company that wants to disrupt web security technology, has raised $20 million in a Series B financing round led by Venrock, with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Allegis Capital, Google Ventures, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem. The new funding brings Shape’s total amount raised to $26 million.
As we’ve written in the past, Shape Security wants to change the web security paradigm by shifting costs from defenders to hackers. The premise is that companies are forced to rely on identifying and classifying malware and botnets attack signatures that have occurred in the past, with the hopes of easily finding and shutting them down in the future. But sustaining this kind of security requires a lot of human and financial capital, so Shape has developed military-grade technology that doesn’t rely on past attack signatures, and instead forces hackers to spend more and more to achieve less and less.
In fact, Shape says the number of large-scale web security incidents has increased exponentially in the past decade. Symantec estimates the overall cybercrime market at $388 billion per year. Last month, the FBI took down a single botnet which alone stole over $850 million.
Unfortunately, the startup is still in stealth mode and has been tight-lipped about exact details of how they are planning to reinvent web security.
Here’s what we know. Shape is developing a technology that spans across sectors, platforms, and more, and the product will be available to the public at the end of this year or early next.
Shape’s co-founders include CEO Derek W. Smith, CTO Justin Call, and VP Product Management, Sumit Agarwal. Agarwal is the former Senior Advisor For Cyber Innovation at the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as former Deputy Assistant Secretary for the department, and was the head of mobile product at Google. And over the past year, Shape has recruited several key executives, including Google’s former click fraud czar, Cisco’s former VP of Application Delivery, and Walmart’s former chief information security officer
“The rise of botnets and crimeware-as-a-service have led to an untenable situation where websites are now cheap to attack and expensive to defend,” said Ray Rothrock, partner at Venrock,. “Shape’s technology will alter this balance. It is unlike anything the industry has ever seen before.”
While the major details behind what Shape is developing are still unclear, it’s clear that investors are excited about what’s in the works. Stay tuned.