Cyber attack forecaster BforeAI raises $10m amid Genea strike

Titanium Ventures has led a raise for a company able to help prevent cyber attacks as hackers infiltrated a leading fertility providers, preying on couples struggling to conceive.

Ransomware group Termite claims to have carried out the attack on IVF provider Genea, stealing more than 940GB of sensitive patient data.

Titanium Ventures has led a $10m raising for a company that can forecast and help prevent cyber attacks as hackers infiltrated one of Australia’s leading fertility providers, stealing personal data from couples struggling to conceive.

Titanium – Telstra’s former venture capital arm that cut ties with the telco last year – is backing New York-based BforeAI. The company, now valued at more than $100m, says it can predict malicious infrastructure attacks 18 days in advance on average and up to nine months ahead.

BforeAI founder and chief executive Luigi Lenguito.

Hackers have become increasingly sophisticated, staging high profile attacks against companies including Australia’s biggest health insurer Medibank, Optus and last month one of the country’s leading fertility groups, Genea.

Ransomware group Termite claims to have carried out the attack, stealing more than 940GB of sensitive patient data.

Genea told patients the folders that had been breached contained information including full names, emails, addresses, Medicare card numbers, medical history and appointment schedules.

BforeAI chief executive and founder Luigi Lenguito did not speak directly about the Genea attack but said the proceeds from the capital raising would be used to accelerate the company’s expansion into the utility, pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors.

“This investment round will enable us to continue our important work to predict and stop new types of attacks before businesses and their customers are harmed,” Mr Lenguito said.

“We did not need the additional funding as we closed Series A with SYN Ventures less than six months ago. We wanted to work with Titanium Ventures to accelerate our growth into new industry sectors where we have already seen recent success and further increase the scalability of our predictions.”

Mr Lenguito said Bfore’s PreCrime platform uses behavioural AI to predict and automatically pre-empt malicious campaigns, resulting in the fastest, most accurate solution to stop attacks weeks before they would have happened.

Marcus Bartram, General Partner at Titanium Ventures said BforeAI offered a “unique solution in a crowded cyber security market”. “Titanium thinks that this capability is important and relevant to customers globally and are excited to be working with the BforeAI team to build a large and impactful company,” he said.

Mr Lenguito founded Bfore in Paris in 2018 and relocated the company to New York last April. It has raised $30m so far.

Originally published as Cyber attack forecaster BforeAI raises $10m amid Genea strike