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Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Quadium raises $20m for IoT device analytics software

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

US startup Quadium has raised $20m to manage, monitor and protect devices in the Internet of Things as the battle for IoT analytics heats up.

Starting from a defence and military background, Qadium built a platform to index every device on the public internet and to identify relationships between those devices at scale for corporate and government cybersecurity applications. Results are made available to customers in a software product called Expander. However, this comes with associated 'professional services' aka consulting, which may demonstrate that we have a long way to go to automate this processes. 

The Quadium platform sends signals across the public internet space, interpreting returned data to determine what devices are running where, and building network graphs to understand relationships between those devices. This empowers workflows associated with mapping one’s presence on the global internet, even for networks with millions of IPs and many active devices. Qadium routinely sees hundreds of millions of devices on the public internet when it conducts its sensing, and has seen many billions since it started gathering its data.

This internet-scale perspective allows customers to “observe their networks as an adversary would over the global internet, and they are often surprised by what they see” according to retired Admiral James Winnefeld, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is an advisor to the company.

Customers in the private sector include Fortune 500 companies in financial services, insurance, healthcare, defence industry, auditing and consulting, and retail. Enterprise networks are no longer enclaves to guard; interdependencies with cloud service providers, credentialed vendors, employees’ devices, and more create porous perimeters that can only be defended with a whole-of-internet approach. David Dorman, technology investor and former CEO of AT&T, affirms that “Qadium’s Expander software is the only enterprise product that monitors the entire device layer of the internet for customer weaknesses.”

Qadium’s co-founders met while working as consultants at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, and won over $10 million in multi-year DoD contracts to begin development of its internet sensing and data analysis prototypes. Qadium has since begun operational transitions to military services, including US Cyber Command. “All of Qadium’s government work is defensive in nature,” said Junio. “We have very strict protocols in place to ensure that we never participate in offensive cyber warfare by any government, including the US.”

The team is largely recruited out of algorithms research groups at Stanford, Caltech, and MIT, and software engineers with top-of-industry experience.

“The secret to how Qadium solved technology problems that no one else could,” says Shaun Maguire, co-founder and chairman, “it is in its people. Only an interdisciplinary group of top minds could have built an end-to-end system of this scope and complexity while delivering profound new insights to the world’s most demanding customers.”

Qadium previously raised $6 million in a seed round that closed in summer 2015. The seed round was led by Founders Fund (Peter Thiel), joined by OATV (Mark Jacobsen), Susa Ventures (Seth Berman), and a group of angel investors. The company intends to spend the money on scaling its core business, including improving its global sensing to continually increase the rate at which customers receive alerts to relevant changes.

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