BusinessMission Secure closes round of seed financing to commercialize cybersecurity technology

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Mission Secure Inc. (MSi), a cyberdefense technology and solutions provider focusing on protecting physical systems and autonomous vehicles, last week announced it had recently closed its seed financing round led by Ballast Fund investors, a private equity firm and several high net worth angel investors.

The financing would allow MSi to commercialize technology and intellectual property licensed from the University of Virginia’s Licensing and Ventures Group, and prototypes developed out of the University of Virginia’s Department of Systems and Information Engineering. The original research and intellectual property, called System-Aware Cybersecurity, was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Secretary of Defense and Virginia’s Center of Information Technology Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF). The company says that System-Aware Cybersecurity has shown success in early stage demonstrations in autonomous vehicle cyberattack and protection scenarios and protections of intelligence gathering and exploitation systems.

“We continue to see a variety of cyber attacks against our defense, financial, transportation and commercial systems. Cyber attacks will only increase in frequency with greater consequences in our connected world. These threats, when realized, jeopardize national security, critical infrastructure and can do economic and physical harm to important systems and people,” said David Drescher, CEO of MSi. “MSi’s technology addresses cyber attack challenges faced by legacy and new critical systems like autonomous vehicles, military missions and industrial control systems. Our revolutionary approach allows us to monitor, detect, inform and automatically correct against a cyber attack. We are dedicated to improving our clients’ ability to address cyber attacks that initialize beyond the perimeter.”

MSi says that the close of this round of financing will allow it further to advance prototype and operational cyberattack testing programs in autonomous systems and cloud computing environments, and build out their solutions portfolio to monitor, detect, inform and correct cyberattacks in the defense, intelligence, transportation, and commercial sectors.

The company also has announced that former White House CIO and cybersecurity expert Carlos Solari will join MSi’s Advisory Board.

“Physical and cyber systems were not designed with security in mind,” said Solari. “Now, these two worlds are colliding as cyber physical systems become interconnected to increase efficiency and productivity. As a result, they face one of the greatest cyber security challenges of our time.”