Tracebit, a cloud threat detection and deception platform, has secured $5 million in Seed funding to make deception technology more accessible to enterprises. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Tapestry VC and angel investors, including Guy Podjarny, Tim Sadler and Ed Bishop, Mandy Andress and 20SALES.
The funding will be used to expand Tracebit’s engineering team and broaden its product offerings, enabling more enterprises to leverage advanced threat deception technology.
Founded in 2023 by Andy Smith (CEO) and Sam Cox (CTO), who previously grew the engineering team at UK cybersecurity startup Tessian (acquired by Proofpoint in 2023), Tracebit aims to democratize threat deception. The platform uses cloud-native APIs to create tailored canaries across cloud networks, enabling enterprises to deploy threat deception in as little as 30 minutes without the need for hardware.
For over 30 years, threat deception techniques like honeypots and canaries have been used by top-tier cybersecurity teams to detect, learn about, and expose malicious actors. Despite their effectiveness, high costs and complexity have limited their use to only the most advanced security teams. Tracebit’s approach makes it feasible to scale threat deception across modern cloud infrastructures.
Currently, Tracebit protects over 250 cloud accounts with 1,500 cloud canary resources, processing over 2.4 billion security events per week. By simplifying the deployment of these resources, Tracebit aims to reduce the mean time for detecting intruders from months to minutes.
Andy Smith, co-founder and CEO, stated, “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, commented, “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!”
Rachel Taylor, Director of Security, Risk, and Trust at Docker, added, “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.”