Horizon3.ai wants to change the way companies address cyberattacks through automation, announcing a new round of funding of $8.5 million led by SignalFire.

The cash infusion is a combination of two rounds of funding – a seed funding of $3.5 million and Series A funding of $5 million. According to Antani, the funding will be used to hire new employees, from engineers to marketers.

“The hardest part of the job is deciding what not to do. You are overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of security problems that you need to go fix,” said Snehal Antani, co-founder and CEO of Horizon3.ai, in an interview with SC Media. “We look at your enterprise through the eyes of the attacker and use that attacker’s point of view to identify what’s exploitable, what to go fix and then actually verify” that the issue has been addressed.

One of the key components of Horizon3.ai’s offering is NodeZero – an automated penetration system that goes into a company’s systems and analyzes and assesses problems of a particular company. The system does not require agents to be installed or attack scripts to be written or maintained.

The technology is applicable to all businesses, but Antani emphasized smaller companies that may not be able to properly assess security threats. Often those organizations rely on a managed security services partner that can integrate Horizon3.ai into the broader solution.

Antani is a former CIO of GE Capital and his partner, cofounder of Horizon3.ai Anthony Pillitiere, is a recently retired veteran from the special operations community.

“What we’re pairing is really deep retired military expertise in cyber and IT and so on, with really deep commercial expertise,” Antani said. “That’s kind of the core foundation of the company.”

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