Company Overview
Founded in 2013 by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Darktrace was the first company to develop an AI system for cyber security.
The company was seed-funded by Invoke Capital, a specialist technology investment fund headed by Dr Mike Lynch OBE, and the Invoke team was instrumental in working with the founders in the early days.
Darktrace founders also include cyber security experts from government intelligence backgrounds, united in their mission to fundamentally transform the ability of organizations to defend their most critical assets in the face of rising cyber-threat.
Darktrace’s pioneering technology, the Enterprise Immune System, applies AI to the cyber defense challenge for the first time, detecting cyber-threats that existing, legacy systems cannot.
It quickly became clear that the technology was powerful enough to identify a diverse range of threats at their earliest stages – including insider attacks, latent vulnerabilities, cloud-based threats and even state-sponsored espionage.
In 2016, Darktrace’s leadership in AI was reinforced with the launch of the first-ever autonomous response technology, Darktrace Antigena. This innovation allowed the Enterprise Immune System to react to in-progress cyber-attacks in a highly precise way, giving security teams the time they desperately need to catch up. When WannaCry ransomware attacks hit hundreds of organizations in 2017, Darktrace Antigena reacted in seconds, protecting customer networks from the inestimable damage.
In November 2017, the company announced a new business unit, Darktrace Industrial, dedicated to fighting threats in industrial and SCADA networks, building on a strong base of customers that use Darktrace AI to protect critical national infrastructure and operational technology.
Darktrace is headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge, UK, with 44 offices globally and over 1,300 employees. It is privately owned, with investors including KKR, Summit Partners, Vitruvian Partners, Samsung Ventures, TenEleven Ventures, Hoxton Ventures, Talis Capital, Invoke Capital and Insight Venture Partners.