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As it emerges from stealth, Hypernative, a startup with a focus on crypto security, has raised $9 million in seed funding, according to co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.
With strategic investments from Blockdaemon, Alchemy, Borderless, CMT Digital, Nexo, and angel investors, Boldstart Ventures and IBI Tech Fund led the funding round. Sagie and Dan Caspi, the CTO of Hypernative, founded the business. The co-founders have experience working at companies like IBM, Google, and Microsoft and have backgrounds in security, large-scale distributed systems development, and cloud infrastructure.
Sagie said, “We saw enormous amounts of money getting stolen, phished, or scammed in crypto early last year and that’s when we created Hypernative. “We wanted to create something to help prevent [attacks] because we saw huge gaps between the tools that were available and the money being invested.”
The group unveiled Pre-Cog, a platform that keeps an eye on both on- and off-chain data sources to identify threats before they happen, as its first product in September. According to Sagie, since its introduction, users have saved “tens of millions” of dollars.
According to Sagie, the startup focuses on “building detection early” and manually connecting its tools through client workflows. He added that the company’s ideal clients include asset managers, hedge funds, traders, market makers, and blockchains and protocols.
Sagie said, “We’re doing detection in advance. Many incidents warned [users] minutes or hours in advance of an attack, so alerts have contributed to attack prevention.
Future prevention workflows from Hypernative are intended to provide “end-to-end systems that mitigate risk without doing anything,” Sagie continued.
Despite the fact that cryptocurrency markets may be in decline, there are still billions of dollars invested in the industry, making it a target for attacks by individuals seeking to make (and take) quick money. According to Immunefi’s Crypto Losses 2022 report, hacks across 134 specific incidents accounted for the majority of losses in 2022, or $3.77 billion.
Every quarter of the previous year featured a few multimillion dollar losses, some more significant than others. According to the report, the fourth quarter of 2022 experienced the highest losses, totaling $1.62 billion across 55 incidents and making up nearly half of the total losses for the year.
Hackers, in my experience, don’t sleep, Sagie said. They don’t care whether the market is in a bull or bear phase. They go where there is money and opportunity.
There is a “big opportunity” to advance the space, according to Sagie, because the cryptocurrency industry needs more tools to help stop hacks before they happen.
Hackers take advantage of market risk and volatility because they enjoy it, he continued. “We must address this issue.”
