Armis Buys Cyber Remediation Startup Silk Security for $150M

Armis has purchased a security prioritization and remediation vendor led by a Goldman Sachs veteran to more effectively address vulnerabilities and misconfigurations with AI and automation.

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The San Francisco-based asset intelligence vendor said its acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Silk Security will help organizations respond to security threats by integrating and managing vast amount of security data, prioritizing remediation effectively and automating ticketing processes. By integrating AI into Silk, Armis hopes to create an automated management system that minimizes manual oversight.

“Armis in general has been being pulled in this direction of remediation management,” co-founder and CTO Nadir Izrael told Information Security Media Group. “Our customers over the last couple of years have been telling us, ‘Okay, you’re showing me all these things. I can manage a lot of different things. I can secure. I can investigate. But how can you help me with the remediation process?'”

Armis’ $150 million acquisition of Silk Security closed Tuesday and comes just two months after the company bought honeypot maker CTCI for nearly $20 million. Silk has been led since its 2022 inception by Yoav Nathaniel, who spent two and a half years as a senior cloud security architect at Goldman Sachs and more than four years leading threat intelligence at Avanan before it was bought by Check Point (see: Asset Management Firm Armis Acquires Honeypot Maker CTCI).

Silk in August 2023 closed a $12.5 million seed funding round led by Insight Partners, the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and Hetz Ventures. All of Silk’s 30 employees will join Armis, and Silk will continue to run as a stand-alone business unit for the indefinite future.

What Armis Brings to the Table

Armis has recently focused more energy on handling identified vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, particularly those exposed to the internet. Izrael said Armis has evolved from understanding the asset attack surface to engaging in comprehensive risk profile management across various organizational landscapes. Customers have pushed Armis toward streamlining the management of security fixes.

But Izrael said cyber remediation is more complex than it initially appears since it involves a complex chain of custody and management, requiring multiple stakeholders to understand their role in the process from asset ownership to actual remediation tasks. Izrael said Silk simplifies the remediation process by prioritizing and automating the creation of tickets for security fixes, which aids enterprises (see: CEO Dibrov on Armis’ Play in Asset Vulnerability Management).

Specifically, Izrael said Silk can simplify complex security management into actionable remediation tasks, automating ticket generation and monitoring the remediation progress. Silk’s automated systems streamline what were formerly manual and spreadsheet-heavy processes, thereby enhancing both efficiency and accuracy in handling vulnerabilities, according to Izrael.

“I think the fact that you can take all the rich risk information and findings and turn it into measurable impact on risk reduction within your environment within the span of the first few hours is a very, very compelling story,” Izrael said. “It’s something that made it really easy for both our existing customers to partake in, but also entirely new customers to Armis as well.”

Connectors were built during the due diligence process that allow organizations to operate Silk and Armis together already, and Izrael said seven-figure deals including technology from both companies have already been consummated.

How Customers Will Benefit From the Armis-Silk Combination

By the end of the year, Izrael wants to bring Silk and Armis together to create a unified security management platform that leverages AI and automation to achieve operational efficiency. Adding Silk will allow Armis to handle large volumes of security data and remediation tasks more effectively, turning complex data into actionable insights with reduced manual intervention, according to Izrael.

“Minimize and automate workflows wherever possible through AI,” Izrael said. “We plan to introduce that into the Silk product as well and unify those experiences together through that.”

Aligning Silk’s risk scoring more closely with Armis’ asset mapping will create a unified experience similar to Gmail and Google Calendar and create a trusted automated process where organizations can govern and manage AI to do work on their behalf, Izrael said. This will allow organizations to dramatically scale their prioritization and remediation capabilities since humans are only needed to manage escalations.

From a metrics standpoint, Izrael will track the upsell of Silk’s technology into existing Armis customers along with completing the integration and introducing AI to Silk by the end of 2024 to ensure the acquisition lives up to its potential. He said AI has the potential to transform the remediation landscape significantly by reducing manual intervention and focusing on exposure management.

“The opportunity here is massive,” Izrael said. “Every enterprise is quickly realizing that there are way, way, way too many issues and vulnerabilities and problems to manage if you’re not doing it intelligently and from a perspective of your exposure and attack surface. And that’s really what we’re all about.”