Yahoo ex-CIO Mike Kail’s new cyber-security startup Cybric raises $1.3M

Six months after his departure from Yahoo, Mike Kail has reemerged as the cofounder and CIO of a security startup called Cybric. His new company, cofounded by Ernesto DiGiambattista, Andrew Gilman, and Sean Walter, is launching today with $1.3 million in seed funding behind it.

Kail left Yahoo nearly six months ago after a lawsuit revealed that he may have been receiving kickbacks from vendors while at Netflix. Since then he’s been operating under the radar.

His new venture addresses all aspects of enterprise security, at a time when many cyber-security startups are busy building their companies around individual security features.

Cybric’s cloud-based platform simultaneously checks for anomalies in applications, integrations, operating systems, data centers, and other components of an enterprise network, using a shadow environment. The company employs high performance computing (also know as fabric computing) so it can perform multiple processes at once. This allows Cybric to constantly scan a network for threats and to automatically remediate vulnerabilities and attacks.

The company has built its platform to easily integrate with other enterprise security technology. The idea is that, through a fabric-based platform, Cybric will be able to give enterprises a more holistic understanding of how secure their network is.

In the last several years, lots of new cyber security startups have emerged to capture gobs of venture capital. For evidence, look at Code42’s recent $85 million raise, or Zscaler’s $100 million funding announcement from over the summer. It’s not just in Silicon Valley either. A recent report from Forbes notes that in 2015, cyber-security companies have raised $2.3 billion, globally.

“There have been tons and tons of companies coming out…and there’s big spending and a lot of confusion and a lot of complexity,” said Cybric chief operating officer Andrew Gilman.

Unlike the legacy institutions that came before them, many of these startups are small and based around a single feature, like protecting web access, data centers, or an internal enterprise network.

Through its new technology, Cybric is hoping to simplify the security space. In the short-term, that means the company will focus on making its technology highly compatible with existing enterprise security software. In the future, it could mean acquiring additional security features to round out its platform.

To gear up for its next phase, Cybric said it will continue to raise funding over the next year.