WINSTON-SALEM – The Winston-Salem-based cybersecurity startup Salem Cyber has closed $250,000 in seed funding, with plans to add strategic hires to help expand capability.
Salem Cyber’s product, Salem, is best thought of as an AI cybersecurity analyst, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Jon Bagg, who spoke with WRAL TechWire earlier this week.
“It’s designed to do a job similar to a cybersecurity analyst, not to replace people, but to empower people,” said Bagg. “There’s too much noise in the system, so what we’re trying to do is give organizations a way to prioritize the areas of threat.”
While a company’s existing cybersecurity workforce can focus on the priority areas, said Bagg, the company’s clients can “allow Salem to sift through the others.”
Investors pour $1.6M into Charlotte cybersecurity startup ThreatSwitch
Starting the company
Bagg’s background includes five years at Booz Allen Hamilton and a decade of cybersecurity work. According to Bagg’s LinkedIn profile, he launched the company in July 2021.
He told WRAL TechWire that he started the company after observing that there was an opportunity “to build something to provide value in an underserved market in a crowded space,” that of cybersecurity.
“People are any security team’s most important asset,” the company’s website reads. “Limited analyst capacity means too few investigations, leading to unrecognized threats.”
Salem’s product enables companies to undergo “a paradigm shift in how to approach alert investigations,” the website reads.
“It’s a capacity play,” Bagg told WRAL TechWire. “One of the most important things to us is the recognition that the people who do this job right now are great, and the processes that they’re using are good, but they’re underwater right now, and that’s the core challenge that we’re hoping to solve.”
Raising the seed round
In a filing with the SEC, Salem disclosed it had raised $225,000 from five investors. But Bagg told WRAL TechWire this week that the company has now closed a total of $250,000 for the seed round.
“We just closed our seed round,” said Bagg. “We’re looking to invest in, primarily, strategic hires, to help expand our capability to get to product-market fit as quickly as we can.”
The company is currently offering its product in “private preview,” said Bagg. “Hoping to get a public preview in the summer.”
