Toronto SaaS startup Orna has secured over $1 million in a seed round led by WGG Capital Canada.
Orna did not disclose the other investors in the round.
Founded last year by Logan Wolfe, Jana Krioukov, and Martyn Gill, Orna offers a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).
Although anchored in Canada, Orna’s team also spans the United States (US) and the United Kingdom.
The company started out as a project within Wembley Partners, a global cybersecurity services firm. The founding team, which has experience in cyber incident response and digital forensics, discovered that Orna had the potential as a standalone solution.
Using artificial intelligence (AI), Orna’s platform is able to provide SMBs with response, reporting, compliance, and prevention strategies.
Using natural language processing, Orna’s AI engine is able to collate data across 28 sources, such as the customer’s infrastructure and the Dark Web, to generate highly detailed attack and incident-specific tasks and actions for teams in IT, legal, executive, HR, communications, and other domains.
Orna claims that it is on track to over $5 million in revenue in its first year of business.
With over $1 million in seed capital, Orna said it intends to invest in marketing, demand generation, and research and development. The startup also plans to bolster its go-to-market partnerships in the US, Canada, as well as the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regions.
RELATED: How vulnerable is Canada to cyberattacks?
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) reported in 2021 that 41 percent of small businesses that experienced a cyberattack said that it cost them at least $100,000, up from 37 percent in 2019. Despite this climbing rate, the IBC also found that fewer than half of the businesses surveyed (46 percent) said they have implemented defences against possible cyber attacks.
For the rest of this year, Orna said it expects to release a number of new features and integrations. According to Gill, this includes blockchain for secure data storage, enhanced AI for inferred incident handling logic, and quantum cryptography applications.
