Prophet Security is shaping up to be one of the biggest startups of 2023 in a cybersecurity world full of alert fatigue and slow threat response times. The company is founded by veterans of StackRox and Red Hat, and is focused on transforming Security Operations Centers (SOCs) with Agentic AI, an autonomous AI analyst that can investigate and act on threats in real time.
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Why the world needs Prophet Security
Current SOCs are overwhelmed by the volume of daily security alerts. Burnout among analysts due to heavy workloads is common, contributing to a decline in job tenure in the field. Many organisations have attempted to adopt Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools with little success, as only a small percentage report successful implementation. Additionally, conventional investigations are still time-consuming, taking 15 minutes to two hours per incident, which slows response time and increases risk exposure.
Kamal Shah and Vibhav Sreekanti recognised these systemic issues and began developing a new solution that replicated human analysts’ logic and analytical skills at a larger scale and greater speed.
What is Special about the AI of Prophet Security?
The Prophet Security innovation features an AI system that serves as a junior analyst, significantly enhancing efficiency. It understands security alerts and creates a dynamic investigation plan for each incident. The AI automatically analyses correlations across various systems, uncovering insights that would take human analysts much longer to find.
After the investigation, the AI assesses alert criticality, assigns priority, and suggests remediations, offloading human analysts to focus on high-impact decisions. This system continuously learns by adjusting its investigative reasoning based on outcomes and reactions, resulting in a smart assistant that can improve response time by up to 90% and reduce false positives by 99%.
A Powerful Beginning: 11M Seed Funding Round with Huge Names Involved
Prophet Security’s novel approach has attracted investor attention. Just months after its inception, it secured $11 million in a seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Prominent cybersecurity investors also joined, adding credibility to the company’s vision.
This investment occurred during a cautious period in cybersecurity funding. However, the founders’ track records and Prophet’s mission to transform SOC operations through intelligent automation convinced investors to take notice.
Designed to work in the Real World, not just the Lab
Prophet Security has achieved notable outcomes in real-world deployments, unlike many startups that take prolonged periods to move beyond proof-of-concept. Its solution is utilised by various organisations in finance, healthcare, and enterprise SaaS, demonstrating quantifiable success.
For example, Clari reduced its security alert backlog from thousands to dozens after adopting the Prophet platform. Companies like Spotnana and Zip have reduced investigation time by over 90%, allowing analysts to resolve incidents more quickly and confidently. Cabinetworks’ CISO described Prophet as a force multiplier, greatly enhancing team efficiency and accuracy. These results underscore the platform’s value and ROI.
Privacy-First, Enterprise-Ready
Prophet Security prioritises privacy and transparency, essential for earning trust in cybersecurity. A founding value is that customer data won’t train AI models, reducing risks with generative AI. AI investigations include clear explanations of logic and evidence for conclusions, enabling analysts to review actions instead of solely trusting machines. The platform offers flexibility with fully managed and on-premises deployment options to meet enterprise needs. Additionally, Prophet has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 certification, which validates its data protection and compliance capabilities. Integrations That Play Nice Where You Work
The efficiency of any cybersecurity platform is strongly associated with the level of its integration with the existing tools. Prophet Security realises this and has designed its system to integrate smoothly with many different technologies, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) platforms, and identity and access management solutions.
Prophet fuses these systems together, establishing a comprehensive perspective of every alert. It brings together information in various sources to create a richer context, in order to make decisions quicker and more precisely.
Why Now? The bigger picture
Prophet Security was created based on two macro trends. One is that malicious parties are beginning to employ AI themselves, and cyberattacks are becoming more advanced and harder to discover. Second, the latest breakthroughs in generative AI and large language models have enabled the possibility of building autonomous systems that can think cognitively.
Prophet Security uses these developments to create an AI assistant that can respond not just to known threat signatures, but can also learn and respond to novel attack vectors – in other words, it adds intelligence and speed to a historically reactive role.
So What’s Next for Prophet?
Prophet Security is gaining early attention, recently featured in the InfraRed 100 list by Redpoint for redefining enterprise infrastructure. Prophet plans to scale its platform for more integrations, enhance threat-hunting, and explore predictive analytics. The company aims to maintain model transparency and ensure compliance with regulations, vital for growth and trust.
Reinventing Cyber Defence with AI
Prophet Security is not another cybersecurity startup company- it is a paradigm shift in threat detection and response as conducted by organisations. Prophet helps to address one of the most urgent issues in the industry by using the intelligence of AI and, at the same time, combining it with the control and flexibility of human analysts, creating a scalable, efficient, and reliable solution to this problem.
With the ever-shifting nature of cybersecurity, organizations such as Prophet Security are not merely adapting to change, they are shaping what the future of defense will entail.
