Raising money is often anti-climatic --- the fundraising process is done, and it’s right back to execution and growth. It’s important to occasionally sit back and reflect.
Stopping cyber criminals and fraudsters has always been a cat-and-mouse game of security innovation paired with malicious actors bypassing that innovation. Cybercrime, if it were measured as a country, would be the world's third-largest economy after the U.S. and China, as it is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021. Incremental improvements won’t even make a reasonable dent. A paradigm shift is required.
HYAS started as a small idea in founder Chris Davis’ basement, in a small town you have probably never heard of, located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He had the goal of enabling a paradigm shift. Today, with the incredible support of multiple parties who participated in our Series B fundraise, HYAS is poised to scale, grow, and make good on that goal by delivering that paradigm shift globally.
S3 Ventures, one of Texas’ leading VC firms, normally focuses on investments in Texas-based companies -- they saw something incredibly special and unique in HYAS. Similarly, M12 (Microsoft Ventures) saw something special when they led the Series A fundraise. When I joined as CEO, the M12 team said to me very succinctly “HYAS has data no one else has and should therefore be able to do things that no one else can do.” Paradigm shifts start with data and new approaches.
Bad actors and fraudsters are tricky, elusive, and creative. However, more than ninety percent of all malware, ransomware, supply-chain and phishing attacks use domain names as the “command and control” structure -- the infrastructure on the Internet that controls the attack, provides the malware with instructions, or otherwise serves as “home base” to steal data and defraud the unwitting individual. Fortunately, HYAS has the secret decoder ring. With the world’s deepest and most advanced datalake of adversary infrastructure, combined with innovations like the HYAS Protect Watch Engine that looks at communication patterns to that infrastructure, HYAS Protect identifies and blocks intrusions, attacks, and attempts to defraud that elude and evade traditional security approaches. With its high efficacy and low false positive rate, HYAS Protect doesn’t contribute to alert fatigue but still delivers unrivaled visibility and protection, especially in a rapidly evolving world with hybrid work-from-x models, a renewed awareness and focus on supply-chain and other advanced attack vectors, and a rise in ransomware. Similarly, the sister product HYAS Insight uses the same datalake to help security and fraud teams rapidly understand evolving threats and take action against them, whether that action is involving law enforcement, understanding one’s adversaries, or simply proactively blocking tomorrow’s attacks, today.
These solutions are delivering results for customers today, including various Fortune 50 enterprises, leading social networks, credit card processors, and others across a variety of verticals. Our Series B fundraise provides us with the ability to turbo-charge the HYAS approach and bring it to the global stage.
We clearly would not be where we are without our amazing employees, partners, and customers, so kudos to all of them on a historic day for our company. I want to thank Wesley Clover in Canada, especially Owen Matthews and Sir Terry Matthews, for enabling this journey many years ago, and S3 Ventures and M12 for their belief and continued support. HYAS is just getting started -- the paradigm shift is real, our customers are seeing the benefit, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.