Shift5: New Investors, $33MM in Series B Funding
Written by William C. Vantuono, Editor-in-Chief
Cybersecurity firm Shift5 has raised $33 million in additional financing, bringing its Series B round to $83 million. Moore Strategic Ventures led the most recent round, signing on Booz Allen Hamilton’s corporate venture capital arm, Booz Allen Ventures, JetBlue Ventures and Teamworthy Ventures. In 2022, Shift5 raised $50 million in its first Series B round led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners. The company’s total venture funding is now $108 million.
“The fundraise comes amid significant business momentum,” said Shift5 Co-Founder and CEO Josh Lospinoso. “In the past year, we more than doubled our ARR (annual recurring revenue) and number of customers across the commercial rail and aerospace sectors, as well as the Department of Defense (DoD) sector, and grew platform deployment rate on commercial and DoD vehicles/weapon systems by 1,275%.”
“Rail operators are getting hit with TSA regulations, requiring them to process onboard data for cybersecurity purposes,” noted Lospinoso. “When you look at what Shift5 has processed—serial bus network traffic is orders of magnitude greater than IT network traffic—rail needs dedicated support to gain compliance.
“Fleet assets are composed of thousands of operational technology (OT) components, each emitting valuable data that can be collected and transformed into useful intelligence, but operators have been locked out. Our platform unlocks onboard OT data and provides modern observability into onboard assets, enabling commercial operators to increase efficiencies and improve fleet safety. In the past year, the Shift5 platform processed more than 37 billion messages from its deployments and identified more than 20 billion unique events occurring at the serial bus level. From these events, we flagged 1.8 million violations. Among these violations, we elevated six critical alerts that required action and led to three assets moving from a non-compliant to a compliant status.
“Gaining observability at the onboard OT level can transform not just real-time operations, but the resilience and safety of the commercial fleets that underpin the U.S. economy. The work we do is foundational—the endless data we capture, add context to, analyze and provide insights around creates a wholly new paradigm for fleet operators and maintainers to make decisions. And in the context of innovations and modern threats, this level of specificity is needed. Our expanded funding round not only validates the successes of the Shift5 business, but will help us support overall safer, more reliable, and resilient commercial transportation fleets.”
Booz Allen Ventures and Shift5 “will together unlock real value for clients in the civilian, federal and military spaces to detect threats, lower risk vectors, and maintain resilience in a time of heightened competition fueled by emerging technology,” said Travis Bales, Managing Director at Booz Allen Ventures. “Our in Shift5 is just one of our answers to how we can ensure national security, public safety and economic security, and bolster the country’s readiness and resilience.”
The Series B financing “will fuel the infrastructure supporting Shift5’s rapidly growing commercial and federal businesses as it expands to tackle the challenge of onboard observability,” the company said. “It comes one month after Shift5 and JetBlue Airlines announced a partnership to bring cybersecurity and data observability of onboard avionics to commercial aircraft, and the company’s first cross-platform Authority to Operate (ATO) Certification from the DoD.”
Shift5 describes itself as “the only hardware, serial bus and protocol-agnostic platform that can perform full-take data capture from the components and data buses of onboard fleets and weapon systems as well as real-time edge analytics, enabling mission and operational insights, reduced decision latency, and modern onboard observability.”
