Oct. 21, 2021

Query.AI, a startup founded in Brookings, has raised $15 million in new Series A financing for its unique cybersecurity product.

The company promotes itself as the market’s only security investigations control plane.

Its newest investor, SYN Venture, joins existing investors ClearSky Security and South Dakota Equity Partners, and follows a recent seed round of $4.6 million, bringing the total funding this year to nearly $20 million. The company also was an investment of Falls Angel Fund.

Patrick Heim, managing partner of SYN Ventures, is joining the Query.AI board of directors as part of the transaction.

Query.AI will use the new funding to scale up its product development to meet rapidly increasing market demand and support its exponential customer growth, the company said in a statement.

“Cybersecurity data no longer lives in just one place,” Heim said. “It lives in the cloud, with third-party providers, and on-prem. Companies everywhere are struggling to figure out how they can bring security operations capabilities to these disparate environments, and they’re seeing that it’s extremely difficult, costly, inefficient and ineffective to send information in and out of these silos. Query.AI offers the only solution on the market that solves this pervasive problem by leaving the data where it lives, connecting to disparate data sources with APIs and serving up the ability to access, investigate and respond to the threats in real-time from one unified browser interface. The Query.AI offering is truly unique and delivers critical value for security operations teams in every industry.”

The market’s need for a technology that can bridge disparate security systems is very real, Query.AI said. The universal data centralization approach doesn’t work, and companies are urgently seeking out other alternatives, it said.

“Enterprises have found that SOAR tools require time-consuming software engineering efforts to build playbooks and manage API integrations, and they are still unable to provide analysts with the ability to investigate interactively. And, XDR still relies on a single technology provider to do all the collecting, aggregating, correlating and analyzing,” said Dhiraj Sharan, Query.AI founder and CEO.

“Our platform is a lightweight solution that doesn’t require organizations to centralize data, assign a dedicated engineer for management or rip and replace any existing, best-of-breed technologies. It is an XDR-enabling connective layer that serves as a data hub to provide direct access to data where it lives and helps SOC teams understand data relationships and initiate response actions.”

Earlier this year, Query.AI was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Security Operations and was included in the Forrester Research third quarter report New Tech: Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Providers. The company also was recognized by CRN magazine as one of the 10 Hottest Cloud Security Startups of 2021.