Victor Oluoma 
StealthMole, a dark web intelligence firm employing AI to combat cybercrime, secured $7 million in Series A funding.
StealthMole, a dark web intelligence company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor cyber dangers and detect cybercrime, announced on Thursday that it has raised $7 million in a Series A fundraising round.
With the new funding, the Singaporean startup with a research and development office in South Korea plans to expand internationally, open more research and development centers, and spur more business-to-business (B2B) applications of its technology.
The chief technology officer (CTO) of StealthMole, Simon Choi, told the media that having an R&D unit in South Korea gives them valuable insights into the behavior of hackers from East Asia. “In a similar vein, we will be able to better analyze data pertaining to neighboring countries if we have researchers from a variety of backgrounds in Singapore for Southeast Asia or in other distinctive places.”
Choi, a threat investigator and open source intelligence (OSINT) profiler with experience as an adviser for the National Intelligence Service South Korea, the National Police Agency, and the Ministry of National Defense in South Korea, and Louis Hur, an enterprise IT security expert and serial entrepreneur in cybersecurity, co-founded StealthMole in 2022.
Fifty different clients in seventeen different Asian, European, and Middle Eastern nations are served by the startup. Cybersecurity incident management, threat analysis, and guidance and assistance are the primary functions of cybersecurity teams within companies. The majority of its current customers are government and law enforcement agencies concerned with national security.
“There is a major deficiency of data points and information networks, particularly within Asia,” Hur stated in the company’s announcement, explaining that the idea for StealthMole emerged from a “critical market gap” he saw while practicing white-hat hacking and cybersecurity. Both deliberate actors and careless users were contributing to the rise in data breaches, anonymous transactions, and other forms of cybercrime. Experts in cybersecurity, corporate security teams, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement must examine geographical settings and their effects on illegal actions if they want to comprehend digital dangers.
The group claims to be able to track down criminals by analyzing 255 billion data points pulled from the black web, deep web, and other hidden sources, such as stolen databases, blogs written by cybercriminals, and Telegram.
According to Kevin Yoo, COO of StealthMole, the company stands out from its rivals in the cybersecurity market due to its extensive knowledge of threats originating in Asia. Rapid digital transformation in Asia led to the highest year-on-year surge in weekly cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2023, according to a report by Check Point Research. The region’s manufacturing sector, which includes semiconductors that store intellectual property, and the growing hybrid workforce make it a potential target for cyber espionage.
“The immense demand for threat intelligence specific to Asia highlights the exceptional value and distinctiveness of our dataset for clients all over the globe, not just in Asia,” Yoo stated.
Korea Investment Partners led the Series A round, which also included Smilegate Investment and Hibiscus Fund, a partnership of RHL Ventures, Penjana Kapital, and KB Investment.