Big50-2017 Startup Spotlight: NormShield

NormShield

What they do: Provide cloud-based cybersecurity software that gives users a “hacker’s view of your attack surface and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on risk.”

Problem they solve: For hackers to exploit vulnerabilities, they must first find them (obviously). Hackers spend a ton of time conducting online reconnaissance, swapping discoveries on the dark web, participating in activist shares, and more. For security tools to keep up, security vendors must conduct their own research to find these same vulnerabilities. We’re not the first (and we won’t be the last) to acknowledge that this is a never-ending arms race.

Early stage #startup NormShield, a #Big50-2017 winner, takes the fight to hackers, using hackers' methods to detect and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.  Share on X

How they solve it: NormShield mirrors hackers’ activities to learn what they know, how they found it, and how they plan to exploit it, so hacks can be stopped before they ever get started. According to NormShield CEO Mohamoud Jibrell, “NormShield conducts the same reconnaissance, detects the same risks and vulnerabilities, analyzes risk levels, and alerts security teams, so they can fix problems before hackers can exploit them.”

To discover vulnerabilities, NormShield relies on multiple scan engines for cross-checking and to decrease false positive and false negative results. NormShield automates scans, aggregates results from multiple tools, prioritizes the riskiest threats, and delivers both recommendations and automatic protections.

Headquarters: McLean, VA

CEO: Mohamoud Jibrell, who previously served as VP of IT, CIO & Officer for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD.

Year Founded: 2016

Funding: This early stage startup is backed by $250K in seed funding.

Competitors include: Tenable, Rapid7, Qualys, Risksense, and Kenna Security.

Customers include: Freddie Mac, MasterCard International, Qatar Bank, Socar, and others.

Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: NormShield is one of the youngest startups in the Big50. Yet, despite being founded in 2016, the startup excelled in the online voting segment of the Big50 competition. We at Startup50 are also bullish on this segment of the cybersecurity market, and NormShield is already doing well within it, having lined up an impressive list of customers that includes Freddie Mac and MasterCard.