HackSurfer raises $3.5M so it can protect your cloud better

HackSurfer co-founder and chief architect Jason Polancich loves rock and roll, wears long hair and goatee, and is 20-year NSA veteran.

He did stints in military intelligence as a Russian and Arabic translator. He spent much of his time at NSA helping develop software and data systems.

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His company has 20 employees spread around the globe, with about half coming from NSA and sister intelligence agencies and the rest from the private IT sector.

It’s not so surprising, then, that HackSurfer also focuses on cybersecurity. His startup’s SaaS offering helps its customers to find and neutralize cyber threats to internal systems coming from a multitude of angles.

As of today, the Maryland-based software cyber security firm has secured $3.5 million in venture funding so it can help protect your cloud better.

The startup’s flagship offering is called the real-time CyberFact Data Model. It provides clients in the private enterprise and government sector with a SaaS-based, cloud-hosted platform to protect company data. HackSurfer is truly multi-platform, Polancich told VentureBeat.

“We’re not a single system but a platform — a collection of data information, storage, and analytics tools. HackSurfer is designed to address risk intelligence and bridge the gap between systems, tools, and data that exist at the lower level [and the higher level],” Polancich said.

Indeed, Polancich, who originally hails from Alabama and today works not far from NSA’s headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md., said eliminating risk and helping protect clients data from being nefariously siphoned by hackers is the primary goal of what his team is doing today at HackSurfer.

“The other side of the coin is your vulnerabilities to those things. We take information from end users and match that to our systems trending cybercrime. [We] provide a one-stop, high-level picture of what is going on in the world,” Polancich said.

Polancich bootstrapped HackSurfer with his wife in order, as he put it, to avoid the business and financing-side hassles inherent in starting an IT company. And he deliberately hand-picked a staff with techies and coders from the private sector who offered an outside perspective on technology and those from the intelligence community and U.S. Department of Defense. People, in other words, he knows well.

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“We’re a pretty virtual company spread around the world,” he said.