Obsidian Security, a newly formed cybersecurity firm in Newport Beach, has raised $9.5 million in a funding round led by Greylock Partners.
The company, created in part by two former employees of Irvine-based Cylance, will use the money to grow its product team, according to the company, which works in security, artificial intelligence and hybrid-cloud technology.
Obsidian planted its headquarters at 610 Newport Center Drive, across the street from Pimco and Fashion Island. The tech firm has seven employees and four people so far on its board of directors.
The company was founded by a handful of cybersecurity experts, notably Glenn Chisholm, the former vice president of product organization and chief technology officer at Cylance, and his colleague Matt Wolff, Cylance’s former chief data scientist and a former computer scientist at the National Security Agency. Ben Johnson, a former co-founder and chief technology officer at Carbon Black in Massachusetts and also a former NSA computer scientist, is a founding partner, too.
“Glenn, Ben and Matt are accomplished product innovators and executives, with strong industry backgrounds in security,” said Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners, in a statement. “We are excited to closely partner with them on their mission, and help build an important new company.”
Chandna and Sarah Guo, also of Greylock Partners, will be on the company’s board of directors.
Greylock, a prominent venture capital firm in the tech world, is based in Menlo Park and has some $3.5 billion in capital under management. Companies in its portfolio include AirBnB, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Obsidian was founded in April, the same month Cylance told the Register it would lay off a handful of employees. The cybersecurity firm would not disclose how many employees were being let go. Wolff and Chisholm said they left before the cuts.
“These changes are a normal part of balancing business needs and company capabilities that carry out each year,” the company said in a statement at the time.
Cylance employs between 500 and 650 people companywide. It was founded in 2012. Its clients include governmental agencies, law firms, schools and companies.
The business of cybersecurity has been booming in recent years as hackers have gained entry to databases connected to Target, Sony and J.P. Morgan Chase.
Research firm IDC expects spending on information-technology security to increase 8.7 percent each year through 2020 to nearly $105 billion, nearly three times the forecasted growth rate of all corporate and government technology spending. In a recent Morgan Stanley survey of big company information technology executives, digital security software was cited as the top 2017 spending priority by the second-highest number of respondents, trailing cloud computing technology.
Bloomberg contributed to this report.
