Polyverse, a cybersecurity startup out of Seattle, announced Thursday it closed on an $8 million funding round to grow its business.
Alex Gounares, the company’s CEO, says most cybersecurity solutions on the market today are reactive. If there is a vulnerability, a user usually doesn’t find out about it until after it was already exploited. This leads to attacks that could have otherwise been avoided.
“The fragility of the world today is just ridiculous,” Gounares told Built In. “You see news of these giant hacks pretty much every week and, as technologists, we look at it and say this is crazy. This is 100 percent preventable.”
Polyverse created a platform that aims to prevent these hacks from ever happening at all, taking inspiration from a decidedly non-techy place: the human body.
“Diversity gives us strength and resilience against viruses. In human DNA, it's only about 2 percent difference amongst people, but even that little bit of diversity makes a huge difference in our resilience,” Gounares said. “So we had that same idea and asked, what if we could make every computer unique?”
Unlike humans, though, the company's Polymorphing for Linux platform was developed to make computers 100 percent different by scrambling the source code without affecting its operation or performance. This makes each version of the operating system unique, ideally preventing attackers from applying any previous knowledge of the system’s weaknesses.
The company says the platform has been validated by the U.S. Department of Defense and is currently run on millions of servers, including those of government and private entities and connected hardware like health care devices. Polyverse was also named one of the world’s top 100 startups by CNBC last year.
Gounares says the company has grown its team by about 50 percent in the last year and that they’re still hiring in Seattle and other markets. The funding will also help the company grow its current presence in the United States and Japan and expand into new markets like the U.K. and Singapore.
The long-term goal of Poyverse, Gounares says, is “to solve cybersecurity once and for all.”
“We're not going to end spying. There's always going to be the James Bond level, spy versus spy type stuff. We're not going to end all issues of criminal activity in the cyber realm,” Gounares said. “But this idea that you can be sitting in a cubicle or in your basement or whatever, anywhere in the world and take over any computer that you want, that's crazy. That's what we're going to stop. If you want to come to steal all my stuff, then you're going to have to send James Bond.”
