Democratizing Threat Intelligence: Our Investment in Filigran

From the debilitating WannaCry ransomware hack that infected 300,000+ computers to the SolarWinds attack that penetrated thousands of organizations, our digital world is becoming increasingly dangerous. To stay ahead of these cyber threats, cybersecurity teams within top enterprises and governments have increasingly been relying on Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). CTI shines a light on malicious activities and the tactics of cybercriminals, making it an essential tool for top cybersecurity teams. Yet, its full potential has often been out of reach due to the costs and complexity of integrating and contextualizing real-time data effectively. As AI-driven threats grow and cyber attacks accelerate, there's a pressing need to democratize access to CTI, making it more affordable, understandable, and actionable for everyone. It's time to revolutionize CTI, ensuring every organization can defend itself against the evolving cyber threats of tomorrow.

Enter Filigran. The company helps enterprises unlock threat intelligence and fully realize its benefits, enabling them to prioritize alerts better, investigate threats, and optimize their existing cybersecurity stack. Thanks to its open-source and easy-to-use offering, Filigran is reducing the barriers to threat intelligence adoption while also building and harnessing a special open-source community to create a network of enterprises, governments, and researchers who contribute to threat intelligence.

When we first met the Filigran team, we were struck by their deep domain expertise combined with an unmistakable passion to democratize CTI and unlock a step-change in its utility for enterprises globally. Filigran was co-founded by Samuel Hassine (CEO) and Julien Richard (CTO) in October 2022. Samuel has more than 15 years' experience in cyber threat intelligence and risk management, including with the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), where he managed and planned national cyber defense exercises before heading up the Cyber Threat Intelligence Analysis team. It was there that Samuel experienced the pain points of incorporating CTI data firsthand. Teaming up with his long-time friend Julien, an engineering leader with a wealth of experience leading big data and AI teams, the Filigran team built their first open-source product, OpenCTI.

OpenCTI allows threat intelligence analysts, threat hunters, and SOC analysts to manage, curate, and collaborate on threat data and intelligence. Users can structure, store, organize, and visualize technical and non-technical information about cyber threats. The platform helps organizations proactively defend against cyber threats by providing insights into vulnerabilities, indicators of compromise, and attacker tactics. FIligran’s ambition is to provide a complete threat intelligence platform (extended threat management or XTM) that covers end-to-end threat intel-related workflows from anticipation to threat response.  

Filigran’s offering, OpenCTI, has already given rise to a passionate community of SOC analysts, threat hunters, and threat researchers. There’s notable excitement and interest in the community as the repository has been downloaded more than 3M times and counts ~4,000 active organizations, including 1,000+ enterprises as users. Since launching its commercial platform in late 2022, Filigran has scaled to several dozen enterprise and government agency customers, including Marriott, Airbus, Novartis, and the FBI.

We’ve been blown away by Samuel and Julien’s knowledge of threat intelligence, the engaged community and impressive enterprise customer base they’ve built, as well as their vision and ambition for the future. We couldn’t be more excited to be joining their journey and leading their Series A. The Filigran team now joins a portfolio of category-defining security companies we’ve partnered with over the years. From early investments in companies that have since gone public, including CrowdStrike, ForgeRock, and Tenable, to more recent partnerships with emerging leaders such as 1Password, Cyera, Oasis, Snyk, and Tessian, we’ve long been believers in cybersecurity.

Congratulations to the team and welcome to the Accel family!

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