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Stamus Networks Inc., a remote-only cybersecurity company with strong Indianapolis connections, has closed on a $6 million funding round that includes investors in both Indianapolis and Chicago.
The round was led by Chicago-based venture capital firm First Analysis, with participation from suburban Chicago firm SmoothBrain Venture Capital and Indianapolis-based investors Elevate Ventures and VisionTech Partners.
Stamus previously raised a combined $3 million in multiple rounds of seed funding. The $6 million Series A round announced Tuesday brings the company’s total capital raised to $9 million. Elevate Ventures and VisionTech are both returning investors, having also been seed-round investors in Stamus.
The company, which has about 25 employees in the United States and Europe, offers network-based threat detection and response systems to clients that include large financial institutions, government entities, large software companies and others.
“We have this stellar list of names that no one can believe this little startup has landed,” said CEO Ken Gramley.
For security reasons, Gramley said the company cannot name its customers, but they include financial institutions that hold more than $10 trillion in assets combined.
Gramley now lives in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina, but he previously lived in Indianapolis and held executive roles at multiple local cybersecurity firms.
Before joining Stamus, Gramley was executive director of strategy and finance at Indianapolis-based Pondurance. Before that he was the CEO of Emerging Threats, a Carmel-based cybersecurity firm that was acquired by California-based Proofpoint Inc. in 2015.
Stamus was founded in 2014 by Éric Leblond of France and Peter Manev of Bulgaria, both of whom Gramely said are well-known in Europe for their expertise in cybersecurity and the open-source security software platform Suricata. Gramley was hired in late 2018 to help Stamus crack the U.S. market.
“We are actually a much better-known entity in Europe than we are here,” Gramley said. Currently, he said, about 70% of the company’s customers are based in Europe, with the other 30% U.S.-based.
Gramley said the company plans to use its Series A funding to hire additional employees in sales and marketing. He said he doesn’t have an exact number but expects that half of those new hires will be in the U.S. and half in Europe.
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