Trinity Cyber has secured $26.3 million in debt from an undisclosed source, according to a listing on Crunchbase. Backed by iconic local investor Ron Gula and chipmaker Intel, the Washington, D.C., firm has previously raised $23 million in Series A funding in 2019.
Taking a unique approach to cybersecurity, Trinity aims to minimize security alerts — including an estimated 45% of false-positives — that drown organizations’ scarce cybersecurity resources and risk too little attention to genuine security issues.
“We must immediately embrace new approaches that focus on prevention at scale and offer technologies that dramatically reduce incident response and false alerts,” founder and CEO Steve Ryan, a former National Security Agency veteran, said about his company’s philosophy. “As singer-songwriter John Mayer describes gravity, ‘Twice as much ain’t twice as good.’ Reducing the flood of alerts will make room for much-needed focus,” he added in a recent article on Dark Reading.
Gula, the founder of cybersecurity giant Tenable Network Security, invested in Trinity last year, betting that its portfolio of products would appeal to about 90% of Americans “left behind” in cybersecurity.
“What sort of company, what sort of industry is needed to address those people? I think it’s somebody like Trinity Cyber, which can dramatically raise the level of security they are accessing,” Gula, whose Gula Tech Adventures invests in cybersecurity startups, said in an interview. “Let’s say you’re a small community college or a local fire department. You don’t have a hunt team and you don’t have cybersecurity hygiene. What one vendor can you go to? Do you need antivirus software? A firewall? By the way, it’s also really good for large institutions too. In fact, maintaining a patch management cycle is particularly difficult for them.”
Trinity believes that every internet session can and should be staged, decoded, parsed, fully interrogated and defended. In 2020, it was recognized as a 2020 Cool Vendor in Network and Enterprise Security by Gartner.
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In addition to Gula joining Trinity’s board, the company has assembled a formidable team led by Ryan and President Tom Bossert, a former homeland security adviser to two presidents. For over three decades, Ryan served the NSA. Among other things, he was a custom chip designer before exiting the organization as deputy director of its Threat Operations Center. Ryan, who received a BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rhode Island, is a recipient of the Presidential Rank Award, the Exceptional Civilian Service award, and a first-place winner of the Department of Defense’s CIO Award.
Bossert, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and a national security analyst at ABC News, joined Trinity in 2019 as chief strategy officer. He has previously founded and led a management consulting business. Bossert received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and a law degree from George Washington University.
Ron Gula, who served in the US Air Force in the 1990s, is best known for cofounding Tenable. In 2020, he was awarded the Northern Virginia Technology Council Cyber Investor of the Year award and the Baltimore Business Journal Power 10 CEO award. Gula Tech Adventures, which he runs with wife Cindy, has invested in 31 companies and several nonprofits, according to CB Insights. Its 2022 investments include 1Kosmos, North American Wave Engine and ShardSecure. GTA’s last exit was Protego in 2019, via an acquisition by Check Point.
