SpecterOps raises $75M in Series B round to scale BloodHound Enterprise

SpecterOps sounds like an organization that offers adversary-focused cybersecurity tools and insights on advanced threat actor tradecraft – and that’s exactly what it is. A release from the Seattle-based company, whose motto is “Know Your Adversary”, says it has raised a $75 million Series B funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from additional investors including Ansa Capital, M12, Ballistic Ventures, Decibel and Cisco Investments.

Per the release, the funding will support SpecterOps’ “rapid scaling of BloodHound Enterprise (BHE), the industry’s first platform for comprehensively removing Identity-based Attack Paths.”  Among the company’s open-source security toolsets, BloodHound is a “foundational tool that enables attack path management in Active Directory, Entra ID and hybrid environments.”

David McGuire, SpecterOps CEO, says the firm’s Attack Path Management methodology “helps organizations manage identity risk by treating the identity ecosystem as a living, interconnected graph, continuously detecting and addressing attack paths. Identity-based threats are growing, often due to the growing complexity of enterprise identity architectures, and enterprises need a proactive, dynamic approach to stay ahead.”

Since launching in 2021, SpecterOps has seen significant growth for BHE; customer acquisition rose over 60 percent year-over-year in Q4 2024 to nearly 200 customers in total. The company is hosting a webinar on “What’s New in BloodHound: Latest Updates and A Look Ahead,” at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 20.

Okta, AWS Marketplace continue fruitful partnership

Okta has reached $1 billion in aggregate sales over the past four years in AWS Marketplace, according to a company release.

“When Okta set out to redefine identity in the cloud, we turned to AWS to build the foundation – and the results have been game-changing,” says Todd McKinnon, Okta’s CEO. “Reaching $1 billion in AWS Marketplace sales marks a milestone in our collaboration. Together, we’re accelerating secure identity adoption worldwide.”

To date, Okta and AWS have collaborated on over 25 product integrations to streamline secure identity and authentication. And they continue to expand the partnership with a new Strategic Collaboration Agreement, which will see the firms collaborate on initiatives including enhanced disaster recovery in key markets, elevated scalability of identity platforms and additional compliance certifications.

In December 2024, AWS recognized Okta as the 2024 Global Marketplace Partner of the Year and Global Non-Profit Organization Technology Partner of the Year.

New IPSIE standard aims to narrow focus for enterprise

A recent talk from the OpenID Foundation’s IPSIE Working Group assembled executives from IDSA, Beyond Identity, Okta and the OpenID Foundation to discuss the development of a “unified industry standard providing full visibility into the technology stack.”

The Interoperability Profile for Secure Identity in the Enterprise (IPSIE) standard is proposed as a way to close critical gaps in the standards matrix. Breaches remain a massive problem, and an “explosion of standards” is not necessarily clarifying a path forward.

Dean H. Saxe, principal engineer for the office of the CTO at Beyond Identity, says the goal with the IPSIE standard is to create “a standard that narrows the scope of other standards.”

“What we’re trying to do is take the existing standards that we have, and narrow the focus of those standards through profiles, to make it easier for people to have a secure-by-design, secure-by-default, interoperable system.”

Article Topics

AWS marketplace  |  cybersecurity  |  enterprise  |  identity access management (IAM)  |  investment  |  IPSIE  |  Okta  |  SpecterOps  |  standards