Gravwell, an enterprise data fusion startup, recently closed a $3 million seed funding round as it aims to compete with Splunk for market leadership.

Gravwell CEO Corey Thuen spent over a decade in industrial control systems, IT, and IoT security before co-founding Gravwell in 2017. At the time, he along with co-founder and CTO Kris Watts consistently noticed a missed opportunity to develop a platform with fundamental capabilities such as defender’s advantage, Thuen said. They were also personally frustrated with some traditional data analytics tools, he added.

"That's why we set out to create Gravwell,” Thuen said. "Essentially what we do is we take in boatloads of logs and network data and basically any record of activity within the system and make that searchable and scalable, so that people can collaborate all these things to identify what's actually happening within their own systems.”

Thuen says his company's product “can do things Splunk’s can’t. We ready to compete with them for market leadership,” he told SDxCentral. “We also see Humio as a competitor with Splunk in this space.”

Gravwell's platform enables users to investigate and analyze unlimited data on demand compared to competitors that require customers “to pay for every bit of data that you put in,” Thuen said. “That's why, from the very beginning, from line zero of code that we put in, we knew that we needed a solution that scales out both technically” and as a business model.

“There's a gap in that people aren't collecting the data, and they're not storing it in a way that allows people to ask questions that they didn't know they needed to ask,” he added.

Thuen pointed to the cyber-threat hunting as an example. “The legacy SIEM [security information and event management] style where it's alert fatigue, and you just have all these high-level alerts. But then if you want to ask questions like, why do you think there's an attacker? Or how can we track the root-cause analysis? That's where this massive gap happens,” he said.

The data analytic platform should be able to bring data science and data fusion to cybersecurity to enable root-cause analysis, Thuen said.

“With unlimited data, a true data science approach makes it possible,” he said. “And that's what we're trying to do for our customers is commoditize that data science, give them the opportunity to do data fusion within their environments, and ask any question they need.”

In its initial years, Gravwell’s team mainly focused on engineering and technology development. Now, Thuen calls the company “imbalanced” and says it needs to level up the business side, and this is where the seed funding will help.

“The primary goal for the funding is for market expansion, addressing the needs of the customers that we've got,” Thuen said. 

Thuen didn’t disclose the company's customer count, but he said Gravwell has users across 30 countries that take advantage of the platform's free community edition.

In addition to its current customers, which include critical infrastructure organizations, Gravwell sees growing demand from general enterprise IT, Thuen said. “This funding helps us expand to additional markets like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 that are dealing with these types of data problems at scale,” he added. “Due to our supercomputing engineering background, we can help them solve that.”