CyberMDX raises $20 million to protect connected medical devices with AI

CyberMDX, a provider of cybersecurity solutions tailored to health care systems, today revealed that it raised $20 million in funding. CEO Amir Magner said it’ll enable the company to bolster its platform and R&D to assist hospital IT, information security, and biomedical teams in securing and managing medical devices.

“We passionately believe in the significance of our work, addressing the growing operational and security challenges that hospitals face,” Magner told VentureBeat via email. “As a result, we partner with all healthcare stakeholders — device manufacturers, regulatory bodies, and healthcare IT and insurance professionals — to help provide a more efficient and secure healthcare ecosystem.”

Solutions like CyberMDX are critical in a world disrupted by the global COVID-19 pandemic. According to a 2019 survey conducted by Swedish software company Irdeto, 82% of health care providers who have deployed internet of things (IoT) devices have experienced a cyberattack on at least one device in the past 12 months. Thirty percent claimed that patient safety was put at risk as a direct result of an attack.

CyberMDX’s platform taps AI to deliver insights into health care systems’ real-time security, on a technical level providing continuous discovery via a network of sensors and switches. It identifies, scans, and inventories connected IT, medical, and IoT devices to detect malicious activity, using micro-segmentation policies to protect patients and data while isolating asset-based threats.

To streamline compliance, CyberMDX employs a range of strategies, including multi-system data collection and automatic documentation and reporting. To this end, admins get a network flow visualization with clinical, vendor, and risk grouping as well as a live inventory with lifecycle alerts. The platform offers clinically aware security grouping, reassignment for specific device shielding, and auto-generated policy recommendations, and its analytics dashboard provides tools for troubleshooting and device optimization, device utilization, digital maintenance monitoring, and more.

Above: A glimpse at the CyberMDX dashboard.

Image Credit: CyberMDX

CyberMDX integrates with existing security infrastructure including vulnerability scanners, firewalls, and workflow managers from McAfee, IBM, Splunk, ArcSight, and others. (According to Magner, the company’s platform protects millions of devices across hundreds of facilities.) And CyberMDX’s thousands of customers like Metro Health Hospital in Ann Arbor have access to its team of researchers, white hat hackers, and engineers, who collect information about possible attack vectors to understand motives, means, and methods.

CyberMDX has direct rivals in MedCrypt and Mediagate, who have attracted over $20 million in capital collectively for their device-defending solutions. Beyond the health care market, there’s Armis Security, which raised $65 million last year for its agentless software-as-a-service solution. Mocana recently nabbed $15 million in funding to develop its end-to-end on-device cybersecurity toolset further. Axonius, which develops software that helps businesses track and secure their connected devices, just closed a $13 million round in April 2020. And IoT cybersecurity startup Vdoo raised $32 million in April 2019.

Competition aside, CyberMDX believes it can carve out a niche in a health care cybersecurity segment that’s anticipated to be worth $27.10 billion by 2026. To this end, it notched year-over-year revenue growth of more than 550% in 2019.

CyberMDX — which Magner cofounded with Moti Shniberg in 2017, and which is headquartered in New York — has raised $30 million to date and has close to 50 employees, and it expects to have more than 80 by 2020. This latest investment was led by strategic partner Sham (Relyens Group), Europe’s largest insurance and risk management provider for health care, with participation from existing investors Pitango Venture Capital and Qure Ventures.