Cybereason Expanding XDR Offering with Empow Acquisition

Cybereason has acquired Empow, a security analytics company based in Tel Aviv. The purchase will expand Cybereason’s extended detection and response (XDR) offering with machine learning (ML)-powered predictive capabilities.

It also provides more than 70 new technical integrations with IT and security service providers, and top product and engineering talent. Cybereason isn’t saying how much it paid for Empow.

The acquisition means Empow’s patented prediction technology will integrate with Cybereason XDR. This ML prediction algorithm anticipates attacker intent and next steps.

Last week, Cybereason launched its new Defenders League partner program. It offers several paths and tiers to address partners’ individual business goals.

Enhanced Partner Investment

Yonatan Striem-Amit is Cybereason’s co-founder and CTO. He said the acquisition will enhance partners’ investment. It will do so by creating clear differentiation against director competitors.

In addition, it will “increase our joint win rate with partners, and provide new partner-delivered service offerings,” he said.

Cybereason’s Yonatan Streim-Amit

“With the Empow technology and team, we will provide enhanced capabilities for the Cybereason XDR offering and further our mission to end cyberattacks on the endpoint, across the enterprise, to everywhere the battle is being waged,” Striem-Amit said. “The acquisition means partners will be able to mitigate one of the biggest challenges facing service providers wanting to deliver XDR in their managed detection and response (MDR) service offering –– data normalization of security telemetry coming from firewalls, IAM, email security, cloud, etc.”

Partners will be early to market with a hybrid, “best-in-breed” approach to XDR, Striem-Amit said. They’ll be able to rapidly incorporate more of the customer attack surface into their managed service. Furthermore, they’ll do this without having to manually integrate other security vendor telemetry through extensible APIs.

Deal Follows $275 Million in New Funding

The acquisition follows Cybereason securing $275 million in crossover financing led by Liberty Strategic Capital. This came after $389 million from Softbank Group, CRV, Spark Capital and Lockheed Martin.

Avi Chesla is Empow’s founder and CEO.

“Cybereason has been recognized as a leader in the endpoint detection and response (EDR) and endpoint protection platform (EPP) space for some time,” he said. “There was a great deal of natural synergy in everything both companies were already doing. And we are very enthusiastic about the acquisition because this is truly a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”