Web3 Security Firm Hypernative Secures $9M in Seed Funding

Crypto security company Hypernative is emerging from stealth with $9 million in seed funding, the firm said Monday.

Boldstart Ventures and IBI Tech Fund led the round, with additional investments from Nexo, Blockdaemon, Borderless, Alchemy, and CMT Digital, among others. The capital will support the firm’s goals to provide a “proactive security and risk prevention platform” for Web 3 companies, decentralized finance protocols and other players in the crypto world, according to Hyperative co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie.

Sagie and fellow co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Dan Caspi said they want to leverage what they’ve learned at top tech companies to assuage the fears of business leaders who struggle to accurately assess security risks in vulnerable spaces like crypto and Web3 and lose out on lucrative business opportunities as a result.

"We saw people falling into phishing and scamming campaigns [and] we saw reputable organizations not entering the field and not sending or investing money because they're afraid of reputation risk, and how to monitor and understand risk,” Sagie told Coindesk.

The fear of phishing attacks and other scams are not entirely unfounded. Roughly $4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies was lost to rug pulls, fraud, exploits and other scams in 2022, according to a report by security risks platform Immunefi.

It's losses like those that inspired the Hypernative team in September to launch its first product, Pre-Cog, a platform that flags potential threats before they occur by monitoring on- and off-chain data sources. The product has already prevented the loss of tens of millions of dollars to date, Sagie said.

The company will also use the new funding to launch more offerings that will rely on historical databases, machine learning models and heuristics to ascertain and generate alerts for potential incidents minutes or hours before they occur. It hopes to allow market makers, asset managers, traders to make more proactive decisions about their businesses and clients’ safety.

“What we see is that the market is very reactive in nature,” Sagie said. “When there is something going wrong businesses focus on how you handle it post-incident, but preventing these things from happening is a very important aspect [of remaining secure].”

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