Esphion
Security solutions for telecommunications, corporate, and government customers in the Asia Pacific region.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
$5.5m | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Founded in 2000 by Johnny Cates, Esphion was a cybersecurity firm based in Auckland, New Zealand that specialized in network anomaly detection systems (ADS) for enterprise clients. The company's core product, Esphion ADS, was engineered to provide early warnings of previously unknown threats to critical network infrastructure. It operated by utilizing neural networks to monitor traffic meta-data, enabling the system to recognize changes in network behavior that deviated from normal operations. This packet-based approach allowed the technology to detect anomalies without relying on pre-established rules or signature databases, which require constant updates.
Esphion's solution was designed for large service providers, offering protection against threats such as DDoS attacks, zero-day worms, and spam bots. A key feature of the Esphion ADS was its ability to not only detect threats in seconds but to also automatically analyze the anomalous traffic and extract a characteristic signature for immediate mitigation. This provided clients with the capability to deploy countermeasures before their network was significantly impacted. The system was developed to be effective almost instantaneously after installation, requiring only a brief two-hour period to prime its statistical pre-processing pipeline rather than a lengthy baselining period.
The firm successfully raised a total of $3.69 million over two funding rounds from investors including BNP Paribas Asset Management, New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, and No 8 Ventures. In 2008, Esphion was acquired by Allot, an IP service optimization solution provider. The acquisition plan involved integrating Esphion's technology and products into Allot's entire product portfolio, including the Allot Service Gateway, to enhance its threat mitigation capabilities.
Keywords: network anomaly detection, cybersecurity, zero-day threat protection, DDoS mitigation, network security, neural networks, packet-based detection, enterprise security, Allot, Johnny Cates, network traffic analysis, automated threat mitigation, signature extraction, worm outbreak detection, IP service optimization, service provider security, network infrastructure protection, venture capital, acquisition, Auckland startup