Ex-Cylance and Carbon Black execs launch Obsidian Security with $9.5 million investment

Obsidian Security just announced a $9.5 million Series A round of investment from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

Founded by executives from two of the highest-profile endpoint security firms in the U.S., Obsidian Security just announced a $9.5 million Series A round of investment from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

Obsidian, headquartered in Newport Beach, Calif., was founded by CEO Glenn Chishold, the former CTO at Cylance; CTO Matt Wolff, former Chief Data Scientist at Cylance and computer scientist at the NSA; and Chief Data Scientist Ben Johnson, former co-founder and CTO at Carbon Black and also a computer scientist at the NSA.

The company will focus on cloud and data center security, putting them in competition with companies like Cisco, VMWare and Illumio. Earlier this week, Illumio announced $125 million in an investment round.

Cylance, which has been valued by investors at over $1 billion, was the focus of controversy earlier this year when an Ars Technica investigation suggested the company’s testing demos included false positives. The company denied any wrongdoing.

Details on Obsidian’s offerings are scant at this point. In addition to the statements announcing the company’s investment round, Ben Johnson blogged about his new company’s use of artificial intelligence and machine learning as tools to secure cloud infrastructure and data centers for major enterprises.

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