Strider secures $45M for data intelligence to avert economic espionage

By Paul Sawers | published in VB Daily

Strider, a platform designed to help companies, governments and research institutions protect intellectual property (IP), talent and supply chains from nation-state threats, has raised $45 million in a series B round of funding.

Founded in 2019, Salt Lake City-based Strider pitches two core products. Strider Risk Intelligence leverages disparate datasets spanning industrial policy documents, international patent data, among other publicly available sources, to help companies identify which of their core technologies may be most at-risk from nation-state actors.

Feeding into this are “risk signals,” which meshes thousands of primary data sources with a “proprietary risk methodology” to spot high-risk activities, and give organizations data to act upon.

“Strider provides data insight to its customers to solve significant security gaps that have been exploited by nation-state actors for decades,” Costa Saab, CTO of Valor Equity Partners (a company invested in Strider), said in a written statement.

With business across the industrial spectrum fighting for technical talent, the Strider platform can also highlight “competitor ties,” showing the flow of talent within a given industry — including competitors that a company’s employees are moving to, which may hold insider threat implications in terms of leaking trade secrets.

This is especially important for government agency workers in particular, who may unwittingly be recruited by companies with ties to “hostile” states.

“There is a growing nation-state sponsored economic espionage challenge and Strider provides technology that [helps] organizations to combat the challenge,” Mike Janke, cofounder of DataTribe (one of the companies invested in Strider) said in a written statement.

The company’s second product, Strider Shield, leans on Strider’s risk signal data to help companies “take a proactive approach” to mitigate the risks associated with IP theft, compliance and talent loss. Strider Shield uses data such as email addresses, domain names, keywords and more, to give organizations insights to expedite investigations and help security and legal teams act more quickly.

Eric Levesque, cofounder and COO of Strider sees the company in a market niche that is just getting starting to see innovation. Levesque claims it also distinguishes itself from competitors because it’s the only company that provides organizations, both private and public, with the strategic intelligence they need to protect their talent, intellectual property and supply chains from adversaries while maintaining a competitive edge in today’s global marketplace.

Prior to now, Strider had raised around $12 million, and with its latest $45 million cash injection, the company is well-financed to double down on its recent growth, which has seen it attain a host of pan-industry Fortune 500 companies across the pharmaceutical, aerospace, semiconductor, energy sectors.

Strider’s series B round was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Koch Disruptive Technologies, One9 Ventures, and DataTribe.