Dallas-Based BreachQuest Emerges From Stealth With $4.4M in Seed Funding From the Founders of Tinder and Other Leading Investors

A new startup in Dallas emerged from stealth today with $4.4 million in seed funding and a goal of modernizing incident response.

BreachQuest is a cybersecurity firm that’s building the “first modern incident response platform.” Called PRIORI, the tech will pair with top industry talent to offer a more intelligent and seamless scoping, remediation, and recovery experience.

To do so, the company has already secured a roster of big-name backers.

The seed funding comes from San Francisco VC firm Slow Ventures; the co-founders of Tinder, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen; and Kevin Mahaffey, the founder of Lookout, an endpoint-to-cloud security company.

BreachQuest plans to use the capital to further develop and eventually roll out PRIORI.

“Two components are always needed to create a successful company,” Rad said in a statement. “First is a disruptive vision and the second is a world-class team. BreachQuest certainly has both of these elements, and I can’t wait to see where they go.”

Team includes former NSA, DOD, and Cyber Command operators

That “world-class team” is what BreachQuest considers its biggest competitive advantage. Its leaders are experienced cybersecurity experts, including former National Security Agency, Department of Defense, and U.S. Cyber Command operators. Together they’ve worked at more than 40 percent of the world’s Fortune 100 companies, according to BreachQuest.

Jake Williams, BreachQuest’s co-founder and chief technology officer, was formerly an NSA hacker and founder and president of cybersecurity company Rendition Infosec, which was acquired by BreachQuest. A.J. King, who has a background in cybersecurity for the financial services sector, will serve as chief information security officer, and Shawn Melito, who was most recently the managing director of business development at Kivu Consulting, as chief revenue officer.

“When you know what’s being spent on incident response, it’s pretty shocking to learn that most coordination is being done today with spreadsheets,” Williams said in a statement. “Critical data takes far too long to gather and synthesize with spreadsheets, leading to substantially higher incident costs and suboptimal outcomes.”

About PRIORI

BreachQuest wants to empower organizations to instantly improve their security measures with the PRIORI platform. It’s taking a “re-engineered approach to incident response and recovery”: The tech offers end-to-end readiness and response capabilities, which gives first responders visibility into exactly where and when a breach occurred.

It’s solving a problem that the team currently deems “unacceptable”—they say the average industry standard for a breach takes 280 days to detect, 334 days to contain, and $3.9 million in costs.

As ransomware threats grow, BreachQuest aims to fill a void by minimizing the cost and downtime associated with breaches.

“BreachQuest was formed to do two things,” CEO Shaun Gordon said in a statement. “First, to deliver an unparalleled incident response that minimizes downtime. Secondly, to develop PRIORI, a comprehensive platform which will re-engineer the incident response process and move incident preparedness into the future.”