Cloud threat detection and deception platform Tracebit has raised a $5 million Seed funding round to provide easy-to-use deception technology to enterprises everywhere.

For over 30 years, cybersecurity professionals have been developing ‘threat deception’ techniques to detect attacks, learn about their behaviours, and expose the vulnerabilities in their defences. These techniques involve creating fake ‘honeypots’ or ‘canary’ resources to draw in malicious actors and catch them in the act. 

Deployed correctly, threat deception is one of the most powerful layers of defence available to enterprises, and research has shown that attackers are less effective and move more slowly when they know canaries are present in a system.

Despite its effectiveness, however, high costs and complexity have meant this technique remains the preserve of the top 1 per cent of security teams. Scaling it across modern cloud infrastructure is usually impractical because it requires painstaking design and setup.

Tracebit is the first threat deception platform to use cloud-native APIs to create tailored canaries across cloud networks to lure out threats. The platform is built with light-touch infrastructure so that enterprises can set up and switch on threat deception across cloud networks in as little as 30 minutes, without hardware. 

Co-founders Andy Smith (CEO) and Sam Cox (CTO) founded the company in 2023 after spending five years growing the engineering team at UK cybersecurity startup Tessian (acquired by Proofpoint in 2023). 

Tracebit currently protects over 250 cloud accounts with 1,500 cloud canary resources, processing over 2.4 billion security events per week.

Andy Smith, co-founder and CEO, said: 

“Our mission at Tracebit is to accelerate the mass adoption of threat deception for enterprises everywhere, and to reduce the mean time for detecting an intruder from months to minutes. 

Honeypots are one of the biggest deterrents to cyber attacks, but have been underused for too long due to their cost and complexity. This funding will help us bring threat deception to enterprises that haven’t felt able to leverage it before.”

Accel led the round, with participation from Tapestry VC along with angel investors including Guy Podjarny (founder of Snyk), Tim Sadler and Ed Bishop (Tessian Founders), Mandy Andress (CISO of Elastic) and 20SALES. 

Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, said: “

Having worked with Andy and Sam during Accel’s partnership with Tessian, I knew first-hand that they’re not only experienced technologists, but also have strong commercial instincts. 

The Tracebit team’s cloud-native approach to threat deception and focus on modern DevOps tools and practices has already gained impressive early traction with customers and I’m excited about partnering with the team again on this new journey!”

Rachel Taylor, Director of Security, Risk and Trust at Docker, said:

“Tracebit has allowed our Security team to further understand expected activity and potentially malicious activity within our environment, leading to further hardening measures and more fine-tuned detections – all without jeopardising production resources.

Its easy to deploy new canaries which scales well with Docker’s rapid development in ensuring we can roll out canaries for new resources.”

The funding will be used to expand Tracebit’s engineering team and increase the breadth of its product offering.

Lead image:Tracebit. Photo: Ivan Weiss.