Empirical Security, a Chicago-based cybersecurity startup, raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Brightmind Partners, with participation from earlier backers Costanoa Ventures and Hyde Park Angels, bringing its total funding to $37 million, Axios reported. The company was co-founded by Ed Bellis, Michael Roytman and Jay Jacobs -- the team behind Kenna Security, which the trio built and sold to Cisco, and behind the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) used industry-wide.
Empirical's product is exposure management, not endpoint detection: its Foundation model monitors more than 18,000 actively exploited CVEs globally to predict which vulnerabilities matter, while Radiant is a custom predictive engine fine-tuned to each customer's specific environment to surface the threats most relevant to it. The pitch is that most organizations drown in vulnerability alerts without a reliable way to prioritize which ones are actually being exploited in the wild.
“The pitch is that most organizations drown in vulnerability alerts without a reliable way to prioritize which ones are actually being exploited in the wild.”
The round lands in the middle of a broader capital wave into AI-era security -- the same week Glow emerged from stealth at a $1.2 billion valuation targeting AI-agent endpoint security, and following Neo's $100 million raise for agentic AI security. Empirical's angle is adjacent but distinct: prediction and prioritization rather than real-time agent containment, addressing a problem that's gotten worse as AI-accelerated exploit development shortens the window between vulnerability disclosure and active attack.
For security-focused investors, the founding team's Kenna Security pedigree is doing real work here -- exposure management and vulnerability prioritization is a category where technical credibility from operators who've already built and sold in exactly this space is unusually valuable, since the product's core promise of accurate prediction is hard to fake with marketing alone.