Stairwell secures $4.5M to help security teams defend against the most sophisticated threats

Stairwell announced $4.5 million in seed investment led by Accel with participation from Sequoia Capital, Gradient Ventures, Allen & Company LLC and other angel investors.

Mike Wiacek, founder of Google’s Threat Analysis Group and co-founder / former Chief Security Officer of Alphabet moonshot Chronicle, leads the company as its CEO and founder. Wiacek is joined by Jan Kang, former Chief Legal Officer at Chronicle, as COO and General Counsel.

There were close to 4,000 confirmed breaches last year, nearly double from the year before, according to the latest Verizon Databreach Investigations Report. Enterprises can’t keep pace with the rapid iteration of attacks without an army of analysts because existing tools are focused on macro security trends, not how those trends impact their specific environments.

Stairwell wants to provide security teams with accessible, user-centric tools that help them understand the pivotal relationships between their external and internal data sources. With this intelligence, organizations will be in a much stronger position to proactively combat the most sophisticated and dangerous cyber attacks.

“Security teams today are beholden to siloed tools that cannot identify ambient connections between their external and internal data sources and provide only baseline level protection against generic threats,” said Mike Wiacek, founder and CEO of Stairwell.

“We started Stairwell so security teams have a cohesive understanding of what’s good, what’s bad, and why, so they can actively defend against the most sophisticated threats.”

“Each year, cyber attacks and corporate cybersecurity spending continue to increase hand-in-hand, and even the world’s top CISOs remain reliant on largely the same set of ‘best practices’,” said Steve Loughlin, Partner at Accel.

“Accel has a long history investing in cybersecurity, and we were thoroughly impressed by Mike’s vision for Stairwell, which has the potential to fundamentally reshape cybersecurity as we know it and solve a dire unmet need.”

Stairwell is building a multidisciplinary team of cybersecurity experts, product designers, software engineers, physicists, and applied mathematicians who share the viewpoint that any security team should be able to defend against every adversary.

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