Tenable to Invest Up to $25M in Early-Stage Cybersecurity Firms

Tenable will invest up to $25 million in startups that can help its cybersecurity efforts.

Those ventures will be part of the company’s new corporate investment Tenable Ventures, the firm said in a news release Thursday (Jan. 26).

“Tenable Ventures will focus globally on early-stage startups developing novel capabilities that help customers discover, assess and manage cybersecurity risk across their attack surfaces to better prevent successful attacks,” the Maryland-based company said.

The company says the project will focus on competitive cybersecurity markets like the U.S. and Israel, investing in firms “tackling significant problems that require new and innovative approaches, data sets and platforms.”

That means companies that use emerging technologies in cloud security, identity management, external attack surface management, operational technology and vulnerability management that could expand the exposure management ecosystem and potentially become part of the Tenable One Exposure Management platform.

Tenable’s investment comes as a growing number of financial institutions are dealing with cyberthreats, according to recent PYMNTS research.

“The State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S.,” a collaboration by PYMNTS and Featurespace, found that 62% of large banks are dealing with an uptick in financial crimes. The frequency and intensity of attacks has reached the point that large financial institutions (FIs) with more than $5 billion in assets bore nearly $120 million in total in average fraud costs last year.

Another study, “The Overlooked Importance of Securing Incoming Payments,” a PYMNTS and nsKnox collaboration, showed that 85% of chief financial officers were investing or planning to invest in digital fraud prevention and risk management tools.

Ninety-five percent of executives said they consider the use of innovative solutions to upgrade their fraud detection and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance a top priority.

Such attacks will eventually become “uninsurable” as they grow, the CEO of European insurance firm Zurich said late last year.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Mario Greco said that cyberattacks could pose a greater danger to the insurance industry than systemic threats like pandemics and climate change.

“What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber,” Greco said. “What if someone takes control of vital parts of our infrastructure, the consequences of that?”

It’s about more than just data privacy, he added, saying “this is not just data … this is about civilization. These people can severely disrupt our lives.”

Greco said there was a limit to what the private sector can absorb when it came to underwriting losses from cyberattacks, and urged global governments to “set up private-public schemes to handle systemic cyber risks that can’t be quantified, similar to those that exist in some jurisdictions for earthquakes or terror attacks.”