My next start-up, Bit Discovery

The biggest and most important unsolved problem in Information Security, arguably all of IT, is asset inventory. Rather, the lack of an up-to-date asset inventory that includes all websites, servers, databases, desktops, laptops, data, and so on. Strange as it sounds, the vast majority of organizations with more than even a handful of websites simply do not know what they are, where they are, what they do, or who is responsible for them. This is also strange because an asset inventory is the first step of every security standard and recommended by every expert.

After many of years of research, it turns out the reason why is rather simple: There are currently no enterprise-grade products, or at least anything widely adopted, that solves this problem. This is important because obviously it’s impossible to secure what you don’t know you own. And, without an up-to-day asset inventory, the most basic and reasonable security questions simply can’t be answered:

• What percentage of our websites have been tested for vulnerabilities?
• Which of our websites have GDPR, PCI-DSS, or other compliance concerns?
• Which of our websites are up-to-date on their patches, or not?
• An organization has been acquired, what IT assets do they have?

As of today, with Bit Discovery, all of this is about to change. BitDiscovery is a website asset inventory solution designed to be lightning fast, super simple, and incredibly comprehensive.

While identifying the websites owned by a particular organization may sound simple at first blush, let me tell you, it’s not. In fact, asset inventory is probably the most challenging technical problem I’ve ever worked on in my entire career. As Robert ‘RSnake’ Hansen’s, member of Bit Discovery’s founding team describes in glorious detail, the variety of challenges are absolutely astounding. Just in terms of cpu, memory, disk, bandwidth, software and scalability in general, we’re talking about a legitimate big data problem.

Then there’s the challenges that websites may exist on different IP-ranges, domains, hosting providers, fall under a variety of marketing brands, managed by various subsidiaries and partners, confused by domain typo-squatters and phishing scams, and may come and go without warning. Historically, finding all of an organizations websites is typically conducted through on-demand scanning seeded by a domain name or IP-address range. For anyone who has ever tried this model, they know it’s tedious, time consuming (hours, days, etc), and false-positive and false-negative prone. It became clear that solving the asset inventory problem required a completely different approach.

Bit Discovery, thanks to the acquisition and integration of OutsideIntel, is unique because we take routine snapshots of the entire Internet, organizing massive amounts of information (WHOIS, passive DNS, netblock info, port scans, web crawling, etc.), extract metadata, and distil it down to simple and elegant asset inventory tracking. As a completely web-based application, this is what gives Bit Discovery its incredible speed and comprehensiveness. Instead of waiting days or weeks for an asset discovery scan to complete, searches take just seconds or less.

After years of hard work and months private beta product testing with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, we’re finally ready to officially announce Bit Discovery and just weeks away from our first full production release. I’m particularly proud and personally honored to be joined by an absolutely world-class founding team. As an entrepreneur you couldn’t ask for a better, more experienced, or inspiring group of people. All of us have worked together for many years on a variety of projects, and we’re ready for our next adventure! Our vision is that every organization in the world needs an asset inventory, which includes what we like to say, “Every. Little. Bit.”

Founding Team (5):

• Jeremiah Grossman (CEO)
• Robert ‘RSnake’Hansen (Chief Technology Office)
• Llana Grossman (Product Management)
• Lex Arquette (Head of Engineering)
• Heather Konold (Chief of Staff) 

Investment ($2,700,000, led by Aligned Partners):

As you can see, our goals at Bit Discovery are extremely ambitious and we need strong financial backing fully realize them. As part of the company launch, we’re also thrilled to announce a $2,700,000 early stage round led by Susan Mason (Managing Partner, Aligned Partners).

During our fund raising process, we interviewed well over a dozen exceptional venture capitalist firms, and we were very picky in the process. Aligned’s experience, style, and investment approach matched with us perfectly. Their team specializes in experienced founding teams who have been-there-and-done-that, who operate companies in a capital efficient manner, who know their market and customers well, and where the founders and investors interests are in alignment. That’s us and we couldn’t be happier with the partnership.

And, as Steve Jobs would say, “one more thing.” Every company can benefit from the assistance and personal backing by other highly experienced industry professionals. The funding round includes individual investments by Alex Stamos (Chief of Information Security, Facebook), Jeff Moss (Founder, Black Hat and Defcon), JimManico (Founder, Manicode Security), and Brian Mulvey (Managing Partner, PeakSpan Capital).

Collectively, between Bit Discovery’s founding team and investor group, I’ve never seen or heard of a more experienced and accomplished team that brings everything together for a company launch. We have everything we need for a runaway success story. We have the right team, the right product, the right financial partners, and we’re at the right time in the market. All we have to do is put in the work, serve our customers well, and the rest will take care of itself.

Finally, the Bit Discovery team wants to personally thank all the many people who helped us along the way and behind the scenes. We sincerely appreciate everyone’s help. We couldn’t have gotten this far without you. Look out world, we’re ready to do this!