The Present and Future of Finite State

Finite State has reached a new chapter. I’m proud to announce that we’ve secured $30 million in our Series B funding round, allowing us to grow our team and continue to fulfill our mission of protecting the devices that power our modern lives.

I’m grateful to our new partners and investors—Energize Ventures, Schneider Electric Ventures, and Merlin Ventures—for seeking us out and putting their faith in our mission and our team. And to our existing investors—Energy Impact Partners, Zetta Venture Partners, Razi Ventures, Drive Capital, and others—without whom we couldn’t have made it to this point. I’m grateful to our customers thus far who have recognized the critical and growing need for device and supply chain security. Most of all, I’m grateful to our incredible team who continues to make all of this possible.

When I founded the company in 2017, I had spent prior years seeing first hand how vulnerable connected devices and embedded systems were to attackers. Since then, the attack surface has grown and supply chain compromises and vulnerabilities have become a regular occurrence. The Finite State team has also grown and changed over the years. We’ve added team members with vast experience and expertise in areas of firmware analysis, research, and product development. We’ve added storytellers whose goal is to understand the complexity of this issue and make that knowledge accessible to those who are still discovering the risk of these devices. We’ve added policy experts who can guide our customers through the ever growing number of regulations built around addressing software supply chain issues. We have built our team around the belief that we must leverage our curiosity, empathy, and depth of expertise to not only make these devices more secure, but to empower others to do the same.

Over the last several years, we’ve built our firmware vulnerability and risk assessment from the ground up to support the intricacies of connected device software development. We provide tooling that goes well beyond what the application security market has historically provided by ensuring our platform is compatible with dozens of different chipset architectures, numerous operating systems, and hundreds of file formats all backed by a massive intelligence database that enables us to discover the open source and third-party software that was integrated via the device’s supply chain.  We then take all of this risk and vulnerability information and make it actionable for product security teams to ensure issues are fixed before the product or software update goes to market. We enable more transparent supply chains by making it easy for product developers to share this risk information with their customers.

These investments in our team, technology, and business are happening at one of the most critical times in the history of product security.  We’re seeing escalation in threats targeting connected devices and critical infrastructure; more widespread, critical vulnerabilities in connected devices; and deepening concerns over supply chain compromises. Buyers of devices and software are dramatically increasing their scrutiny of the security embedded in the products that they’re buying, and the developers of those products are feeling the pressure.  Beyond that, rapidly increasing regulations and standards have many companies scrambling to keep up with compliance requirements just to be able to sell their products.  In response, the market for product security solutions is growing rapidly, as companies look to mitigate potentially existential risks to their business while using security as a differentiator in the market.

With this new round of funding and the support of our incredible investors and partners, we are able to leverage this world-class team that we have built, continue to enhance our innovative solutions, and scale Finite State to face the security challenges of the IoT era.