Global Counterintelligence Firm, Utah-based Strider Technologies, Has Just Closed a $55 Million Round of Series C Funding

The funding was led by Pelion Venture Partners, Utah's largest VC firm, and will help Strider "expand operations to new geographies in Europe and Asia, and more aggressively address the public sector market" as the firm helps provide organizations of all types with previously undiscovered data and insights on bad actors around the world.

Is it possible that a Utah tech firm has emerged as the ultimate response to that John le Carré question in his bestseller novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:

"Who can spy on the spies?"

I believe the answer is a simple "Yes."

The firm I'm referencing is South Jordan, Utah-based Strider Technologies, and I give you the fact that Strider formally announced early this morning that it has now closed on $55 million in new funding.

To me, this funding round is proof point No. 1 that Strider has clearly found an unmet need in the global marketplace.

Leading the funding round was Utah's top venture capital firm, Pelion Venture Partners, which says that its investment in Strider's C Round of funding is the largest check, figuratively, it has ever written.

And that's saying something given that during its lifespan Pelion has raised over $2.0 billion in investment capital over its near 30-year history.

Joining Pelion in the funding round are AXA Venture Partners, and existing investors Valor Equity Partners, DataTribe and Cyfr Capital, with Pelion's Blake Modersitzki joining the Strider Board of Directors

To be clear, however, the lede of this write-up is actually not the investors, but rather Strider itself and the fact that in the five-ish short years since its founding in 2019, Strider has arguably become the leading global provider of publicly available counterintelligence data, information and insights.

This is why I feel that Strider has now

• Raised north of $110 million in total external funding,
• Developed and delivered four separate, SaaS-based product offerings to help sniff-out and identify bad actors at all levels that put Strider clients at risk, and currently offers
• Customized consulting services via nearly 200 employees located in 10 countries around the world.

The Strider Backstory: Capturing, Sorting Through, and Interpreting "Digital Exhaust"

When I first learned about Strider Technologies and interviewed 2 of its 3 co-founders, identical twin brothers Greg and Eric Levesque (CEO and COO, respectively), it was June 2022, and the firm had just closed a $45 million round of Series B funding.

That was some 3+ years after its official launch in 2019.

And yet the mutually experienced inflection point that pulled the two brothers back together and away from their respective professional paths in foreign relations and investment opportunities was this: A 2016 report from the Office of the United States Trade Representative that claimed that the People's Republic of China was responsible for $600 billion in annual theft of United States trade secrets.

$600 billion!!!

That info led the Levesques to partner with their friend/colleague, Michael Brown (Strider's current Chief Data Officer), to co-found Strider Technologies with a basic premise in mind:

Can we create an Information Security platform that will scour the digital planet to look for, detect, analyze, and decipher the "Digital Exhaust" of the Internet?

If successful, this Infosec platform would be built upon a highly secure Artificial Intelligence engine powerful enough to operate across scores of languages, in every nook and cranny of the World Wide Web to uncover nefarious intents and activities of governments, corporations, and lone wolves (aka, "solopreneur spies").

The Growing Evidence of Strider's Success

Today, Strider Technologies does just that.

And it does it very, very well.

Don't believe me? Fine.

Just look at the growing Who's Who list of former military, intelligence agency, government, and cybersecurity experts who have joined Strider in either full-time or advisory roles over the past few years, including

• A former head of Canadian Intelligence;
• A former Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy;
• A former U.S. Navy Admiral (Ret.);
• A former U.K. Vice Chief of the Defence Staff in its Ministry of Defence;
• A former Deputy Director of the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit;
• A former U.S. National Security Advisor;
• A former Director of Partnerships for Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and a
• A former Assistant Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),

just to name a few.

And, for instance, I found this short video to be quite intriguing as Strider's Senior Intelligence Advisor, Tim Khang, offers specific insights into how the company's email security tool, Shield, "... provides verified email addresses, domain names, and key words directly linked to state-sponsored actors."

Today, Strider says it has "... amassed over 12 billion publicly available documents from hard-to-reach global sources ... data (that) helps the biggest organizations ... advance their innovation and secure their people from state-sponsored risk."

Strider says it is also collecting and analyzing over 20 million new documents daily from over 50,000 unique data sources.

In addition, as Strider's team of technology-supported professionals evaluate newly uncovered data, Strider is able to publish reports such as "Europe in the Crosshairs: The PRC's United Front is Boosting Efforts to Target the Semiconductor Sector."

In publicly available reports like these, Strider has uncovered countless examples of how the People's Republic of China has systematically deployed long-tail efforts to steal the knowledge, experience, and even technologies of European semiconductor firms.

Case in point, Strider uncovered that over a 20-year-period, over "... 30,000 individuals have left top European technology companies, including premier semiconductor firms, and moved to PRC-headquartered companies."

And that's just one example of Strider-uncovered counterintelligence success.

So ... to Team Strider and its investors, a tip o' the hat for completing the latest funding round, along with a sincerest "Best Wishes for Future Success" sentiment sent your way as well.

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Thx. DLP