Three months after changing its name and deciding to focus exclusively on security, Versive is partnering with Cloudera to bring its artificial-intelligence powered security technology together with Cloudera’s big data expertise.
The two companies plan to pitch a “joint solution” to security engineers and executives that promises to help them detect threats across their network before the damage can be done, according to Versive. The Versive Security Engine will be able to run on top of a company’s Cloudera big-data installation to analyze network threats and (in theory) automatically detect threats before human security engineers have to notice the patterns themselves.
There are a lot of companies trying to sell similar products. Startups like JASK, Cylance, Tanium, Darktrace, and Illumio have raised millions of dollars to tackle security problems using artificial intelligence to automate much of the painstaking security review that used to require a human being in the loop. And big cloud vendors are ramping up their security products as well, as shown by Amazon Web Services’ purchase of harvest.ai and Microsoft’s purchase of Hexadite.
Partnering with Cloudera, one of the leading companies used by enterprises to manage their exploding volumes of data, might give Versive an edge by allowing it to learn from Cloudera’s expertise with huge data sets. But Versive, based in downtown Seattle, has spent most of its life focused on financial data analytics until revealing it has been working exclusively on security in May.
Prior to that, the company was known as Context Relevant, and while it featured high-profile advisors like counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, the financial products seemed to have more traction, based on investments in the company from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America in 2015.
