Hypernativea crypto-security-focused startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding because it stems from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie told australiabusinessblog.com exclusively.

The funding round was led by boldstart ventures and IBI tech fund, with strategic investments from Blockdaemon, Alchemy, Borderless, CMT Digital, Nexo and angel investors. The company was founded by Sagie and Dan Caspi, who is also the CTO of Hypernative. The co-founders collectively have backgrounds in cloud infrastructure, building large-scale distributed systems, and security, having worked at places like IBM, Google, and Microsoft.

“We founded Hypernative early last year when we saw massive amounts of money being stolen, phished or scammed in crypto,” said Sagie. “We saw huge gaps between the existing tools and the money invested, so we wanted to create something to help prevent this [attacks].”

In September, the team launched its first product, Pre-Cog, a platform that monitors on- and off-chain data sources to predict threats before they happen. Since its launch, it has helped save users “tens of millions” of dollars, Sagie said.

The startup is focusing on “early detection of buildings” and manually connecting its tools through customer workflows, Sagie said. The ideal client base ranges from asset managers, hedge funds, traders and market makers dealing with crypto to blockchains and protocols, he added.

“We do pre-detection,” Sagie pointed out. “Many incidents alerted [users] minutes or hours before an attack happened, so we’ve helped prevent attacks through alerts.

Going forward, Hypernative aims to build prevention workflows that “provide end-to-end systems that mitigate risk without doing anything,” Sagie added.

Even though crypto markets may be down, there are still billions of dollars invested in the space, making it a target for attack by those looking to make (and take) money quickly. In 2022, most of the losses, or $3.77 billion, were due to hacks in 134 specific incidents, according to Immunefi’s Crypto Losses 2022 report.

Last year each quarter had a handful of multi-million dollar losses, some larger than others. The fourth quarter of 2022 saw the most, with $1.62 billion in total losses across 55 incidents, accounting for nearly half of total losses for the year, the report found.

“In my experience, hackers don’t sleep,” Sagie said. “They don’t care if it’s a bull market or a bear market. Where there is money and opportunity, they go.”

The crypto industry needs more tools to help prevent hacks before they happen, so “there’s a big opportunity” to improve the space, Sagie said.

“Hackers enjoy and take advantage of risk and volatility in the market,” he added. “It’s a problem we need to solve.”