Open Raven's co-founder Dave Cole, a former chief product officer for Crowdstrike and Tenable Network Security, said in an interview that the company aims to combat the ever increasing number of data breaches that have sucked up consumer data with open source tools. Open Raven's other co-founder is Mark Curphey, who founded SourceClear and previously worked at Microsoft.
"There's nearly a new story every day," Cole said. "A lot of these are instances where an org simply lost control of what data they had where, and it ended up on the internet. And people found it before they did."
Over the last decade, Americans have been hit with the constant drumbeat of data breaches, from Equifax to Capital One. The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday charged four members of China's military with hacking credit bureau firm Equifax in 2017 and impacting the personal data of 145 million Americans. But Cole notes that the majority of data breaches aren't Russia, Iran or China hackings, but accidental data exposures.
Their security product is free — though users can opt to pay for a higher-powered version — and created to be friendly for those who aren't trained in data security, Cole said. Open Raven uses a 3D map that helps visualize their systems so users can clearly see where data is and whether it's secured.
Cole said the company will make its "core discovery capabilities" open source under a permissive Apache 2.0 license later this year.
In a news release, the company described the increasing web of regulatory frameworks that firms must wade through, though it's unclear whether Open Raven is currently set up to deal with privacy regulations like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act. Cole did not immediately respond to follow-up questions on the issue.
"Beyond the obvious market opportunity, I was drawn to this team's commitment to team building, brand building and user experience building from day one," Nortman of Upfront Ventures said in a post online.
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