We are co-leading an investment round in spiderSilk, a promising cybersecurity venture that is reinventing Attack Surface Management (ASM) and going after global markets.
We need to rethink cybersecurity from first principles. What started in the 1990s as signature-based antivirus and firewalls have proven insufficient against increasingly sophisticated attack vectors; supply-chain attacks, 0-day drive-by exploits, side-channel attacks, etc. This complexity is what’s driving the sector to become a red ocean, and driving more noise to customers than signals. We need to approach these risks from a new angle - we are thrilled to have met SpiderSilk, our first investment in this sector.
spiderSilk enables organizations to gain full visibility on their own digital assets and monitor them for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations. The technology is unique in its precision to attribute hard-to-find assets to their owners, even with minimum data on these assets. Their agentless approach is responsible for uncovering a long list of findings, including MoviePass, Samsung, WeWork, Clearview AI, and EA - to name a few.
Globally, investments into the cybersecurity space amounted to $50bn in 2020, with $2bn being deployed in the Middle East. The largest piece of that pie goes to companies offering network management solutions along the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications (TMT) and SaaS verticals. Internet penetration in the region has surpassed 60%, which has more than tripled in the last decade. This, coupled with regional enterprises becoming more security-conscious, demands more focus on innovation in cyberdefense. We believe that spirderSilk is uniquely positioned and has the potential to provide critical support in every development pipeline and CISO dashboard.
At STV, we have always described ourselves as investors in “bridging the dichotomy between digital supply and digital demand”. Cybersecurity is the perfect sector to demonstrate this division - despite our region being a critical market for cybersecurity vendors, it is the market with the lowest VC cybersecurity funding.
We invest in technology-first thinkers. Rami El Malak and Mossab Hussein are on the cusp of something big and we are privileged to witness them taking their first steps, and excited to join them on their journey to becoming a category-defining company.