Existing backer Active Capital and new investors Rain Capital and SaaS Venture Partners also participated in the financing.
Husband and wife Drew and Ashley Rose founded the company in June 2017 out of their home in Austin with the mission of making cybersecurity training more fun and engaging. (They later moved to an office only to be back at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic). It does this by leveraging gamified learning with live action immersive storylines, role-based micro modules and reporting.
The company launched with a Cyber Escape Room as its flagship product. It has since evolved into a full platform, and works with over 70 large enterprises to train their global workforces to better protect sensitive data and secure their organizations. Customers include CVS Health, Mass Mutual and Amerisource, among others who are among the Fortune 500.
CEO Ashley Rose believes the company will see even more demand for its offering in the face of increased remote workers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Increased demand
The company, which operates as a software-as-a-service provider, plans to use its new capital to expand its product and boost its sales and marketing teams.
As part of the financing, Mike Dodd of Silverton Partners will join Living Security’s board of directors.
To Dodd, Living Security’s offering is “well-timed.”
“Human error and lack of awareness are the primary causes of enterprise security breaches,” he said. “The company’s product is an intelligent data application that integrates back into the overall risk strategy for the enterprise.”
Indeed, Ashley Rose told Crunchbase News that having more employees working from home naturally leaves organizations and enterprises more vulnerable to cyber attacks. The premise behind Living Security is that because training is more fun, employees retain far more when training on cybersecurity.
“We wanted to make cybersecurity more tangible for people by providing them with something fun to do while learning about it,” Rose added.
Deb Walter, AmerisourceBergen’s manager of information security training, said that Living Security’s use of gamification and “small tidbits of information” has “worked” for her organization when it came to training its associates.
Previously, Living Security had raised $1.8 million across two tranches of a seed round. According to Rose, it saw a 1,100 percent increase in annual recurring revenue in 2019 with revenue currently at about $1.5 million. It currently has 22 employees.
