When covering Gradient Cyber and Auctus Capital Partners’ recent support to the leading provider of cybersecurity and security operations as a service (SOCaaS), VentureBeat turned to ACP’s Managing Partner Muhammad Azfar and Gradient CEO Steve Chappell for insights on the transaction, trends in the sector, and how the company is well-positioned to be a leader in the market.

“Cybersecurity and protecting business infrastructure against major disruption is more important than ever given today’s digital transformation efforts and the often-total reliance on IT infrastructure to transact business,” said Azfar, who led the transaction that provides working capital to facilitate growth as the company caters to needs amid rising incidence of cyberattack and digital transformation induced by the pandemic.

The full article is available on VentureBeat here.

ACP and Security Platform Provider Gradient Cyber Look to Bring 24/7 Monitoring to Enterprises

VentureBeat | Tim Keary | March 10, 2022

Last week, Auctus Capital Partners (ACP) announced that it had become the exclusive advisor of cybersecurity-and-security-operations-as-a-service provider Gradient Cyber and secured $10 million from in financing from Revtek Capital to accelerate the growth of the company.

Gradient Cyber’s solution provides enterprises with 24/7 security operations as a service support with a mixture of network monitoring, log ingestion, intrusion detection systems, endpoint integration, threat management, asset communication discovery and network data anomaly detection.

It also has a security intelligence platform that can correlate real-time data and logs to improve transparency over risks throughout their environment.

The solution is designed to enable enterprises and technical decision makers to outsource their security operations tasks to a third-party, so they can ensure that they’re protected against advanced threats.

The need for 24/7/365 visibility

Security operations teams, whether onsite or offsite, need to have 24/7/365 visibility to prevent intrusions. However, many organizations simply don’t have the resources to pay security professionals to continuously monitor their environments.

The need for 24/7/365 support and the rising cost of security operations, has led to many organizations to outsource their security to managed service providers (MSPs). In fact, last year 83% of IT leaders reported they were looking to outsource security to MSPs.

More and more organizations are starting to recognize that continuous monitoring isn’t negotiable; it’s essential.

“The majority of all cyberattacks happen to small businesses and mid-market enterprises. When it comes to cybersecurity, these IT teams have the toughest job out there. They have to take care of everything IT-related — in addition to managing security. All too often there is no one dedicated to security — and even if there is, they can’t work 24/7,” said CEO of Gradient Cyber, Steve Chappell.

“This lack of resources, security expertise and 24/7 coverage means security alerts and logs are regularly ignored or overlooked. This leaves threats to go unobserved, propagate, and remain in the IT environment for months if not longer,” Chappell said.

Gradient Cyber aims to help smaller enterprises address this predicament by providing access to the expertise of senior cybersecurity analysts on a subscription basis, to make it easier for small IT teams to manage their security effectively with threat and risk assessments, and an extended detection and response (XDR) service.

A look at the managed SOC-as-a-service market 

Gradient Cyber is part of the SOC as a service market, which researchers valued at $471 million in 2020 and anticipate will reach $1,656 million by 2025 as the number of cyber incidents across the globe increases.

Today, Gradient Cyber is competing against a number of other SOCaaS and XDR providers. These include Cysiv, a SOCaaS provider with 24/7 managed detection and response capabilities that closed a $26 million Series A funding round in 2020,

Another is Artic Wolf, a SOCaaS provider that offers enterprises managed detection and response with network monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and real-time issue escalation, which raised $150 million in a series F funding round in 2021, and achieved a $4.3 billion valuation.

Each of these approaches enables enterprises to protect their IT environments without investing heavily in their onsite teams, but Chappell believes Gradient Cyber’s approach is unique due to its focus on serving small businesses, and its use of a proprietary XDR platform that leverages advanced threat detection methodologies like ML and AI.