Security Software Company Veriflow Closes Second Funding Round Within 90 Days of Launch

Veriflow, an enterprise technology company that has created a novel approach to detecting network breaches and outages, announced this week that it secured $8.2 million in Series A financing. The funding round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including New Enterprise Association (NEA). The company was just launched out of stealth in April, when it received $2.9 million in in seed money from NEA and from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Investors seem to be betting on the unique security approach created by Veriflow’s founders, a team of computer science professors and Ph.D. students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to a company spokesperson, Veriflow is the first networking company to apply mathematical network verification — a formal system verification method primarily used by industries requiring high precision such as airline flight controls, medical devices and military defense systems — to secure today’s most complex and dynamic IT networks.

“The level of complexity and pace of change in enterprise networks have both increased dramatically,” said Brighten Godfrey, Co-Founder and CTO of Veriflow, in an email interview with Newscenter. “With every change implemented and its impact assessed manually, every change could cause an outage or open a vulnerability. We give enterprises the courage to change with mathematical confidence.”

According to Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research, the New York-based information technology research and advisory company, network administrators have traditionally used manual procedures to diagnose and mitigate problems occurring in their networks.

Veriflow goes a step further, by proactively monitoring systems to detect vulnerabilities before they happen and precisely determine the culprits. “The feedback from customers and analysts indicates the market is ready for [this] new approach to network breach and outage prevention,” said Veriflow CEO James Brear, former president of Procera, in an official statement.

Veriflow will use the new financing to grow the company’s sales and engineering teams, as well as to fund marketing efforts to encourage broader industry adoption of its proprietary technology for network protection.