When you spend a lot of time studying the cybersecurity market, you meet a lot of jaded and tired people. Cybersecurity professionals spend long hours juggling too many tools and alerts to battle a never-ending onslaught of threats and attacks. And they are often let down by their technology vendors.
That’s why it was refreshing to meet Stellar Cyber, an innovative Silicon Valley startup that’s focused not on the latest marketing acronym but on giving cybersecurity pros a more efficient way to do their jobs. Stellar understands the exhaustion that people have in their jobs, and they’re focused on solving that by reducing the hours and the number of tools needed by small cyber teams.
Stellar is building the holy grail of cyber tools, an integrated, multipurpose cyber analytics platform that’s open to any data source and built to be run without a huge security operations center. The company has $102 million in funding and is armed with significant technical pedigree, including a host of patents and industry awards.
Minding the Midmarket
Stellar is laser focused on the midmarket, generally considered a company with between $10 million and $1 billion (according to Google Gemini), which includes thousands of sizable enterprises.
“My vision has been to help security teams harness the power of thoughtful AI implementations, enabling them to be more strategic and efficient,” said Aimei Wei, the chief technical officer and founder of Stellar Cyber. “The midmarket, more than anyone, needs this capability—[as they’re] facing the same complex threats as large enterprises but without the same resources.”
These midmarket companies, just a notch below the vaunted Fortune 500 but probably larger in aggregate market size, don’t get the same attention from the larger vendor community, which is typically focused on the largest companies in the world. And a typical midmarket company might be in a non-technical market, such as retail or manufacturing, with a staff of a few people tasked with all cybersecurity operations. They need to lean heavily on managed security service providers or outsourced security operations centers.
Most importantly, according to the customers I spoke with, Stellar doesn’t behave like the giant cybersecurity conglomerates, overwhelming you with marketing to close a deal only to avoid picking up the phone when the crisis hits.
A Toolset for Everybody
Russell Haile runs IT support for Jerry’s Chevrolet, a network of three car dealerships in Weatherford, Texas, that typifies a midmarket company. With about 350 employees, Haile said the company is not big enough to staff up a huge cybersecurity department, but it’s big enough that it needs to lock down all its IT assets. And most of the staff is focused on selling or servicing cars, not running IT.
“Stellar has taken a very complicated and deep subject and they have made it very easy for a system admin like me to manage the infrastructure and protect against threats,” Haile told me in an interview.
Haile partners with Blackswan Cybersecurity, a managed security services firm. Blackswan CEO Dr. Mike Saylor says the industry is rife with companies that will sell you a cybersecurity product and then ignore you after the sale. He said Stellar is different.
“We chose Stellar because it wasn’t just another monitoring company, it’s full lifecycle from services, pen testing, and responding to hacks and threats, as well as litigation support,” said Saylor. “They helped us develop a strategy and they are a great partner. We’ve met the leaders and we have joint communications.”
Saylor said Stellar came at just the right time, after Blackswan had dropped another vendor that had damaged their business because of poor support. He said most of the larger cybersecurity vendors don’t focus on the midmarket, and they can’t support it.
The SOC-less Services Story
The common theme in customer testaments is that a cybersecurity vendor needs a comprehensive approach that provides the customer with a deep platform as well as support.
That’s how Stellar arrived at its solution set, which consists of an integrated and open platform that can be delivered with a partner and connected to a large number of data sources and tools. The company says its patented XDR Kill Chain and Case Management dramatically reduces the risks and costs of security operations without requiring a huge team.
This approach cuts to the heart of the challenges we hear about from cybersecurity professionals. They frequently complain that there are too many tools, too many promises, and too little integration. Often that results in a tangled web of complicated cybersecurity products. This trend has led Nikesh Arora, the CEO of industry giant Palo Alto Networks, to completely reorganize around the trend he calls platformization.
Steller started down the path to platformization from the beginning, helping customers integrate multiple data sets to analyze threats from a central platform—with a simple, easy to understand, volume-based pricing model.
Cybersecurity in 5-hour Energy
Another customer, Jonathan Mayled, is an established Information technology leader with over 25 years of experience, currently serving as the CTO for 5-hour Energy.
In a written statement to Futuriom, Mayled said most companies don’t have the resources to manage or support a large SOC. He says his team of two experts coupled with a third-party SOC regularly struggled with managing data and alert fatigue. Large, legacy tools were not footing the bill or sustainable. In stepped Stellar Cyber.
“[Stellar is] a cohesive platform that offered a multitude of event correlation, analysis, and response tools,” wrote Mayled. “This sets it apart from other competitors in the cybersecurity market space.”
Mayled says that Stellar’s strength is in integrating data as well as in many of the functions required from the alphabet soup of cyber acronyms, including SIEM, NDR, XDR, and AI-driven analysis. Stellar natively integrates data from all these potential sources and from any endpoint detection and response tools the customer has, then correlates events to identify and stop threats.
Mayled says it took the team approximately 45 minutes to configure the appliance to begin ingesting logs from the various cybersecurity platforms that they maintained, including cloud connectors. Stellar then analyzes and correlates traffic patterns. Stellar takes an open approach, working with popular cyberanalysis platforms and data sets such as MITRE and Splunk.
“Fundamentally, the Stellar Cyber appliance was the missing component that addressed the issue of event correlation and analysis across multiple disparate platforms, while subsequently eliminating the need to increase human capital within this small-to-medium business,” Mayled wrote.
Stellar’s approach targets a market that may have been completely ignored by the gigantic cybersecurity industrial complex, which includes many large companies targeting different segments of the cybersecurity alphabet that assume customers have large teams or SOCs in place to support a tangled web of tools and complicated integrations.
Stellar, headed by CEO Changming Liu, has just been added to Futuriom’s upcoming report on the top 50 startups to watch for the third year in a row. It recently raised another funding round, which now gives it a total of $102 million from top investors such as Highland Capital Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital, and Samsung Next.
