Energy Impact Partners, a private equity firm backed by former executives from General Electric, has made a $10 million investment in cybersecurity firm Dragos. Dragos was created by a former NSA analyst and focuses on protecting power grids from attacks.
The investment round was co-led by EIP and Allegis Capital, with additional support from DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup studio that initially funded Dragos. Allegis Capital has venture partnerships with a variety of cybersecurity big wigs including David De Walt, former CEO at FireEye & McAfee as well as Joe Levy CTO at Sophos.
According to a statement from the company, the funding will be used to increase the company’s workforce to meet rising customer demand, generated through key partnerships with Deloitte, the global audit and financial advisory services firm, and CrowdStrike, a provider of cloud-delivered endpoint protection.
Dragos made news earlier this summer when it identified malware in the wild that had been used against a grid in Ukraine. Dragos report prompted a level one alert from the North American Reliability Corporation in order to inform grid providers that new malware was in the wild.
Cybersecurity is a top concern for grid providers and policymakers working on resiliency and protection of critical infrastructure. As CivSource has previously reported, there have been several recent efforts on the part of states and municipalities to focus on resiliency. Microgrids are also gaining traction with hospitals and other anchor institutions as a means of providing grid redundancy in the event of an outage or other damage to primary grids. The National Governor’s Association (NGA) also has a working group devoted to working with policymakers on developing response plans for extreme outages and other grid issues.
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