Crypto security-focused startup Hypernative has raised $9 million in seed funding to emerge from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie told TechCrunch EXCLUSIVELY.
The funding round was led by boldstart ventures and IBI Tech Fund, with strategic investments from Blockdaemon, Alchemy, Borderless, CMT Digital, Nexo, and angel investors. The company was founded by Sagie and Dan Caspi, who are also his CTOs at Hypernative. The co-founders collectively have a background in building cloud infrastructure, large-scale distributed systems and security, and have worked at places such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft.
“We created Hypernative at the beginning of last year after a huge amount of cryptocurrency was stolen, phished and scammed,” Sagie said. “We saw a huge gap between existing tools and the money being invested, so we wanted to create something that would help prevent that. [attacks]”
In September, the team announced its first product, Pre-Cog. It is a platform that monitors on-chain and off-chain data sources to predict threats before they occur. Since its launch, users have helped save “tens of millions of dollars,” Sagie said.
The startup is focused on “building detection early” and manually connecting tools through customer workflows, Sagie said. Its ideal customer base ranges from asset managers, hedge funds, traders and market makers that interact with cryptocurrencies to blockchains and protocols.
“We do proactive detection,” Sagie said. “Many incidents have been warned [users] We were able to prevent attacks by sending alerts minutes or hours before they occurred. “
In the future, Hypernative aims to build a prevention workflow that provides “an end-to-end system that mitigates risk without doing anything.”
The cryptocurrency market may be on the decline, but there are still billions of dollars invested in the sector, and it is a target for attacks by those looking to make (and steal) money quickly. increase. According to Immunefi’s Crypto Losses 2022 report, the majority of losses in 2022, or his $3.77 billion, were due to hacks across 134 specific incidents.
Last year, we lost millions of dollars each quarter, some more than others. The fourth quarter of 2022 will be the busiest, with 55 incidents resulting in a total loss of $1.62 billion, nearly half of the total losses for the year, the report shows.
“In my experience, hackers don’t sleep,” says Sagie. “They don’t care if it’s a bull market or a bear market. Where the money and the opportunities are, they go.”
The crypto industry needs more tools to prevent hacks before they happen.
“Hackers enjoy when there is risk and volatility in the market and take advantage of it,” he added. “That’s a problem we have to solve.”
