London-founded Tracebit, a cloud-native threat deception technology for enterprises, has raised $5 million in seed funding. Accel (which invested in Transcend) led the round with participation from Tapestry VC along with angel investors, including Guy Podjarny (founder of Snyk), Tim Sadler and Ed Bishop (Tessian Founders), Mandy Andress (CISO of Elastic) and 20SALES.
The funding will be used to expand Tracebit’s engineering team and increase the breadth of its product offering. It helps the company provide easy-to-use deception technology to enterprises everywhere.
What issue does the company resolve?
For more than 30 years, cybersecurity professionals have been developing ‘threat deception’ techniques such as fake ‘honeypots’ or ‘canary’ resources to detect attacks, learn about their behaviours, and expose the vulnerabilities in their defences. It has been proven that attackers are less effective and move more slowly when they know canaries are present in a system.
Despite its effectiveness, however, high levels of cost and complexity have meant this technique remains the preserve of the top 1% of security teams. Scaling it across modern cloud infrastructure is usually impractical because it requires detailed design and setup.
Developed with a cloud-native, modern tech stack, Tracebit’s threat deception platform is the first to solve these issues and operationalise and scale in the cloud, opening up access to threat deception techniques for thousands of cloud-based systems.
What does Tracebit do?
Tracebit was founded by Andy Smith and Sam Cox in 2023 after spending five years growing the engineering team at UK cybersecurity startup Tessian, which Proofpoint acquired.
It is the first to use cloud-native APIs to create tailored canaries across cloud networks to lure out threats. The platform is built with light-touch infrastructure so that enterprises can set up and switch on threat deception across cloud networks without hardware.
Tracebit reduces the average detection time of an intruder in cloud systems from months to minutes.
Its turnkey offering opens threat deception up to thousands of enterprises who until now have found it too expensive or complex to implement. Enterprises can get set up with Tracebit in as little as 30 minutes.
It currently protects over 250 cloud accounts with 1,500 cloud canary resources, processing over 2.4 billion security events per week.
Andy Smith, co-founder and CEO, said: “Our mission at Tracebit is to accelerate the mass adoption of threat deception for enterprises everywhere and to reduce the mean time for detecting an intruder from months to minutes. Honeypots are one of the biggest deterrents to cyber attacks but have been underused for too long due to their cost and complexity. This funding will help us bring threat deception to enterprises that haven’t felt able to leverage it before.”
Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, said: “Having worked with Andy and Sam during Accel’s partnership with Tessian, I knew first-hand that they’re not only experienced technologists but also have strong commercial instincts. The Tracebit team’s cloud-native approach to threat deception and focus on modern DevOps tools and practices has already gained impressive early traction with customers and I’m excited about partnering with the team again on this new journey!”
Clientele spectrum
Tracebit has had phenomenal traction currently protecting over 250 cloud accounts and processing over 2.4 billion security events per week. Customers include Riot Games, creators of League of Legends, and UK genAI unicorn Synthesia.
Chris Hymes, CISO at Riot Games, said: “Riot Games has leveraged Tracebit to rapidly scale deceptive coverage across our cloud and enterprise estate. The automated platform has enabled us to roll out rapidly and the precise nature of the detections produces low volume, high-value alerts.”
Martin Tschammer, Head of Security at Synthesia, said: “Tracebit’s platform enables high fidelity alerts, is quick to deploy, easy to maintain, and secure by design. Their solution delivers actual value and is getting better by the day.”
Rachel Taylor, Director of Security, Risk and Trust at Docker, said: “Tracebit has allowed our Security team to further understand expected activity and potentially malicious activity within our environment, leading to further hardening measures and more fine-tuned detections – all without jeopardising production resources. It’s easy to deploy new canaries which scales well with Docker’s rapid development in ensuring we can roll out canaries for new resources.”
What do we think about Tracebit?
Tracebit is revolutionising cybersecurity by making threat deception accessible and scalable for cloud-based systems. With $5M in seed funding, the company aims to democratise the use of honeypots, reducing the detection time of intruders from months to minutes. Its cloud-native, easy-to-deploy platform is already trusted by notable clients, ensuring robust and swift threat detection.
