Cynomi’s founders plan to use the $37 million raised in a Series B round to enhance the agentic AI and automation capabilities of their virtual CISO platform for MSSPs and MSPs, while expanding their presence in the U.S. and Europe.
Launched in 2020, Israeli startup Cynomi announced its latest funding round this week. Co-founder and CEO David Primor pointed to the company’s strong growth, noting a 4.5X increase in annual recurring revenue in 2023 and 3X growth the year before. He emphasized the expanding opportunity for both Cynomi and the service providers it supports.
“The demand for cybersecurity and compliance services has never been higher, particularly among SMBs, who often lack the internal resources to meet growing cyber and regulatory requirements,” Primor
wrote in a blog post. “This has created a massive opportunity for service providers, but only if they can scale their offerings effectively. I believe Cynomi is uniquely positioned to support this transformation.”
The $37 million funding round, co-led by Insight Partners and Entrée Capital including the participation from existing investors Canaan, Flint Capital, and S16VC, will allow the Cynomi to expand its partnership ecosystem. Right now, the focus has been on MSSPs, MSPs, consultancies, and telcos. Executives will now reach out to other service providers, including integrators and resellers.
100% Partner-Focused
Despite a renewed focus on expanding the partnership ecosystem, Cynomi’s go-to-market focus won’t change, co-founder and COO Roy Azoulay told MSSP Alert.
“We operate exclusively through a partner-based model with service providers, and that approach will remain central to our strategy,” Azoulay said. “While we're expanding to collaborate with a wider range of partners – for instance, we are now working with the service arm of a major European telecom provider – our commitment to a 100% partner-driven model remains unchanged.
Cynomi offers an AI-driven vCISO service to MSSPs and MSPs for SMBs and mid-size enterprises. The idea behind vCISOs is to offer access to experienced security professionals who operate as consultants to companies rather than sit as full-time executives on a company's management team. This gives clients the cybersecurity expertise they need at a lower cost than having a full-time executive.
vCISO Business is Booming
Business Research Insights analysts expect the global vCISO market to grow from $1.06 billion in 2023 to
$1.48 billion by 2032, driven by the growing complexity of cyberthreats and expanding security regulations. The field is growing competitively, with a range of companies offering vCISO services, including big names like Amazon Web Services and vendors, such as CyberSecOp, CisoShare, and Optiv.
Cynomi is also observing a growing
demand for vCISO services. In a 2024
survey of MSSP and MSP executives, 21% respondents offered vCISO programs and almost 98% expected to provide them. About 94% reported growing customer demand for vCISO services, and 59% of those that introduced such offerings saw increases in both revenue and margins.
In his blog post, Primor also highlighted that partners reported as much as a 70% reduction in manual work when using Cynomi’s platform, enabling them to grow their businesses and improve service quality.
Bring on the AI Agents
AI is central to Cynomi’s platform, enabling the automatic creation of risk and compliance assessments, gap analyses, policies, remediation plans, progress tracking, and more. These capabilities are powered by Cynomi’s AI engine, according to Azoulay. Now the company will focus on expanding its use of
AI agents.
“Our agentic AI capabilities will allow us to take this a step further, [such as] allow a human analyst to assign increasingly complex tasks to autonomous agents,” he said. “These agents will carry out the work independently, with human input required only at key decision points. This not only boosts efficiency but also frees up experts to focus on higher-value strategic activities.”
The infusion of money will allow the company to add new features, deeper integrations, and enhanced functionality to expand the platforms capabilities and bring them to market more quickly, the COO said.
“Beyond product development, we’ll also invest in resources to help our partners become even more proficient in providing cybersecurity services, boost their cybersecurity business, and increase their revenues and profitability through these services,” Azoulay said.
