Safe Raises $70M Series C to Scale Cyber Risk Management

A cyber risk management vendor backed by ex-Cisco CEO John Chambers raised $70 million to autonomously predict, detect and block threats before they materialize.

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Silicon Valley-based Safe plans to use the Series C funding to help develop “cyber AGI” by expanding its agentic AI capabilities and integrating with external cybersecurity platforms, said co-founder and CEO Saket Modi. He said Safe has established a strong foothold in Cyber Risk Quantification, is gaining fast ground in third-party risk management and launched into continuous threat exposure management.

“Imagine an extremely autonomous system of intelligence, which can predict, detect and automatically block a hack before it is successfully executed,” Modi told Information Security Media Group. “That’s the ultimate promise of cybersecurity. This has to be a layer of intelligence on top of CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.”

Modi founded the company in 2012 during his final year of engineering school in India, hauled in $5 million of Series A funding from Chambers in 2017 and changed the company’s name from Lucideus to Safe in February 2021. The company closed a $50 million Series B round led by Sorensen Capital in April 2023, and Safe’s most recent funding round was led by Avataar Ventures (see: Safe, Axio, KPMG Dominate Cyber Risk Quantification Rankings).

Why Cyber AGI Is Safe’s North Star

Most of the new capital will be invested in the platform itself, with a heavy focus on AI/ML innovation, proprietary model development and expanded use of cyber insurance claims data for risk modeling, Modi said. Unlike startups that allocate a disproportionate share of funding to sales and marketing, SAFE is deliberately channeling the bulk of its capital into R&D to help maintain product superiority, he said.

“Over the past two years, our revenue has gone up almost 6X, so we’re doing really well. So therefore, now is the time to put fuel on fire,” he said. “We are clearly number one in CRQ. We are fast becoming number one in TPM. And yesterday, we also announced continuous threat exposure management. So now our platform, which is one platform of autonomous cyber risk management, has three modules.”

Safe’s CRQ is focused on strategic, board-level cybersecurity decision-making and is used by major enterprises to quantify business risk in dollar terms. TPRM handles the entire vendor risk life cycle from discovery to risk assessment to action using autonomous workflows. And CTEM prioritizes vulnerabilities based on actual business risk using the same principles that drive its CRQ engine, Modi said.

“So CTEM is bottom-up, CRQ is top-down, while third-party is all about your ecosystem,” Modi said. “So, if you think about it, all of the three beautifully are synergistic to each other. This was something that our customers asked us, so therefore, we created that.”

Modi’s cyber AGI relies on contextual awareness, risk-based intelligence and machine-to-machine automation through Safe’s agentic AI architecture, already comprising 50 AI agents. Cyber AGI isn’t about replacing existing security tools like EDRs or firewalls. Instead, it will serve as an intelligent decision-making layer on top of tools, ingesting their signals and outputting autonomous, risk-prioritized actions.

“If AGI comes, everybody in the world wants that because it really makes your life better,” Modi said. “Cyber AGI will truly protect you, proactively, predictively, without worrying about a hack. That is the place where we are going toward. We think that’s the boldest vision that a cybersecurity company has ever taken in history.”

How Safe Plans to Pursue Cyber AGI

Safe will not attempt to build its own endpoint or detection solutions in pursuit of cyber AGI, and will instead integrate telemetry from existing best-of-breed tools and translate them into autonomous, intelligent actions based on contextual risk, Modi said. Safe will serve as the horizontal intelligence layer, translating disparate signals into coherent, risk-prioritized decisions across the enterprise, Modi said.

“We don’t need to compete with the CrowdStrike’s or the Palo Alto Networks’ or the Zscaler’s of the world,” Modi said. “We would rather integrate with them. And we will be all about layer of intelligence on top to say, ‘How can you action based on risk, and do that in an autonomous way?’ That is what cyber AGI will be all about.”

Safe hasn’t lost a CRQ deal in two years except when budget constraints made rivals more appealing in the short-term, Modi said. In TPRM, Safe has gone beyond legacy players such as BitSight and increasingly encounters workflow-driven vendors including OneTrust and ProcessUnity. CTEM is still new for SAFE, but Modi expects to face off against companies the likes of Qualys, Tenable, Avalor (part of Zscaler) and Zafran.

“That’s a brand new take on CTEM. We don’t know a single product which is even 10% as automated as we built it,” Modi said. “We did the same with TPRM. That’s why customers love us. So, yeah, that’s fundamentally different.”

Safe maintains a magic number above 0.7 (which measures the efficiency of sales and marketing spend), boasts gross margins above 85% and net retention over 120%, which reflect a healthy combination of new growth and deep product stickiness. While Safe is not currently profitable, Modi said the company is on track to continue doubling its revenue annually.

“We are very, very healthy when it comes to our metrics,” Modi said. Funding is available in the current market, he said, “that’s why for us, putting this round together was not very difficult. We spent a few months and we were able to put together $70 million.”