CybaVerse is aiming to become the UK’s “number one MDR vendor”, its CEO revealed as he played down the threat AI frontier models pose to the channel.
Having scored £5m in Series A funding in October, Portsmouth-based CybaVerse is ploughing the proceeds into its CybaOps platform, as well as marketing funds for its reseller and MSP partners.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, CEO Ollie Spence claimed there is a lack of MDR technologies coming out of the UK.
“We didn’t take £50m of Series A and go for world domination – we really want to be the number-one UK MDR vendor,” the former Royal Marine said.
CybaVerse’s UK status means it can “pop in” to see its MSPs and resellers once a month, while giving them the whip hand among their customers.
“It’s all about relationships,” Spence said.
“We’ve just started working with one of the largest resellers in the UK in the public sector space. That’s actually a requirement coming down from government now that they want UK-based businesses and SOC services.”
Tackling tool sprawl
Starting off life in 2018 as a red teaming consultancy, CybaVerse moved into the SOC space before more recently productising its offering for the channel.
Its CybaOps platform is designed to provide all-in-one cyber security management combining detection, compliance, security and testing into one SaaS product.
This means it can solve the “tool sprawl” challenge many resellers and MSPs are grappling with as they bolt more disparate products into their cyber stack, Spence claimed.
Although CybaVerse is set to launch an EDR offering in September, CybaOps’ status as a technology-agnostic platform means it is compatible with other EDRs such as Microsoft Defender, CrowdStrike or SentinelOne.
“Our platform does a nice job of consolidating all these different tools, while still giving MSPs options to have flexibility in the technology for different levels of customers they have,” Spence said.
“Is AI going to crush all cyber companies? Absolutely not”
Asked about the advent of Claude Mythos and other frontier AI models, Spence claimed the initial concerns around whether they could “kill” cybersecurity as we know it have “petered out”.
“Has AI been game changing? Yes, absolutely. Is it going to crush all cyber companies and put them out of business? Absolutely not,” he said.
“I actually don’t think it’s the AI frontier models themselves that will cannibalise the cyber market. I think what you will see is a lot of smaller companies operating at pace being able to challenge some of the larger vendors – and those larger vendors sucking them up through an acquisition.
“Equally, from the attacker side, they don’t just automatically give you a complete route into the business. All the partners and people we speak to haven’t had a sudden wave of AI-based attacks that have taken over their companies or their customers’ networks.”
The volume of vulnerabilities being found across businesses has risen dramatically, Spence added, however.
“That then comes down to the fundamentals,” he said.
“People need to start looking at things more from an overarching point of view to understand their attack surface better and how they’re going to remediate and secure their environments.”
This article was produced in association with CybaVerse and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
