AI-Based Attacks , Fraud Management & Cybercrime , Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development

BlackCloak Raises $17M to Boost Cybersecurity for Executives

A startup led by the Royal Bank of Scotland's former privacy leader raised $17 million to provide threat modeling and deepfake protection to C-suites and boards.

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Orlando-based BlackCloak said the Series B funding will help the digital executive protection vendor scale both its product development and concierge services to help protect high-profile individuals from cyberthreats in their personal lives. Growing BlackCloak's engineering and security teams will enable the company to offer deepfake protection, threat intelligence and incident response tailored to executives.

"This is different than any other mission that's been out there," founder and CEO Chris Pierson told Information Security Media Group. "We're the pioneer. We're the first company that is here, tackling this issue for corporations. We need to grow the engineering team and the product team."

BlackCloak, established in 2018, employs 60 people and has raised more than $30 million in four rounds of outside funding. The company has been led since its founding by Pierson, who previously spent five years as the Royal Bank of Scotland's chief privacy officer. The Series B round was led by Baird Capital, whose work with SaaS companies and high-net-worth clientele aligns with BlackCloak's mission (see: The Blurring Personal-Professional Executive Risks of a CISO).

"They see what we're building for both corporations and high-profile individuals and got really, really excited about it, and all the different value that they can bring to the table themselves and through their connections," Pierson said. "The pain points that we're solving are not just relevant to the clients that we already have, but they're very deeply relevant to Baird and their own clients as well."

Top Cybersecurity Threats Facing Corporate Executives

Deepfakes are a growing concerns for executives and board members, who Pierson said are increasingly targeted due to the availability of personal images and voice files online. BlackCloak aims to mitigate the risk posed by deepfakes through real-time threat intelligence and by locking down personal accounts, which Pierson said helps customers reduce vulnerabilities to cyberthreats like impersonation attacks.

"Making sure that we're there in terms of locking down their different accounts and their different device access is one part," Pierson said. "And having really top-notch education and training for them based off of specific threats that we see and specific threat intelligence that we pick up to be able to train and 'harden the human' from these types of susceptibilities is also really key."

BlackCloak also wants to bolster its incident response capabilities for breaches in executives' personal lives to ensure those threats don't spill over into corporate security risks. High-profile people are often targeted in personal cyberattacks that have corporate repercussions, leading BlackCloak to offer threat intelligence and modeling for people focused on executive threat assessments and real-time protection.

"BlackCloak provides this platform in protection mode - which includes incident response - to remediate any issues that are at home so that the CISO doesn't have to worry about a threat externally hampering a current incident response on the inside," Pierson said.

How BlackCloak Plans to Address These Threats

The company plans to triple the size of its engineering and product teams to accelerate platform development, adding roles including full-stack developers and scrum masters to achieve those goals. Pierson said it's important for BlackCloak to build in-house technologies such as its deception engine Tarnhelm to protect clients from emerging threats.

"We build our own technology in-house, we utilize our own technology in-house, and it's critically important that we continue to accelerate that pace and drive even more value," Pierson said. "The amount of privacy and cybersecurity risks out there just continue to grow, and this is a very, very special and unique population."

Some of the funding will be used to hire more cybersecurity analysts, incident responders and privacy specialists to scale BlackCloak's concierge services, which provide personalized cybersecurity protection to executives and their families. Pierson said BlackCloak's concierge team offer around-the-clock support to help clients understand cybersecurity threats and ensure their personal security is well-maintained.

"Clients absolutely love the interaction. They love the people that we're bringing to the table, and they love understanding more about privacy and cybersecurity," Pierson said. "Our whole platform is not just technology and product, but it's that mixed with the concierge team that makes it so unique and so special. And for that next phase, that concierge team is going to grow quite substantially."